Fischbach Castle

The estate belonged first to the Abbey of Echternach, for centuries the wealthiest institution in Luxembourg, and the earliest holder recorded independently of the Church took possession in 1050 — Udo of Fischbach, the first lord named in a surviving charter. The lordship is among the oldest in the country. Its holders were still in the field more than two centuries later: at the Battle of Worringen in 1288 the lords of Fischbach fought to the death.

Fischbach afterwards moved by marriage and by purchase rather than by conquest. In 1466 Angèle of Fischbach married Henri of Boland, lord of Rollé and Esch-Sauer. In 1571 the castle passed to Bernard II of Orley, lord of Lënster and Meesebuerg. In 1628 François de Cassal bought a share of the castle, and his descendants bought the remainder of the lordship in 1674.

In between came the war. The Thirty Years' War reached Fischbach in 1635, when Polish soldiers serving in the army of François of Lorraine burned the castle; the destruction was complete, and Fischbach had to be rebuilt from it.

Iron, not war, shaped the next stage. A blast furnace and a forge went into operation beside the castle in 1768. In 1803 Charles Joseph Collart bought the Fischbach ironworks from Ignace-Antoine de Cassal et Bomal, the last lord of Fischbach, who had held the title from 1777 to 1795; the sale carried every dependency with it — the farm at Kéideng, the paper mill at the works, and the castle itself. His son Hubert Joseph inherited in 1812 and a second Charles Joseph Collart in 1822. That heir died young, and in 1836 the property was bought by Auguste Garnier, a former director of the works, who handed it on to the SA Belge des Hauts-Fourneaux.

Grand Duke William II bought the estate in 1847, the first head of state to own the castle, to consolidate his political control of Luxembourg and to placate the local populace after the Belgian Revolution. He immediately ordered much of the industrial plant pulled down. In 1884 Duke Adolphe of Nassau bought Fischbach from Grand Duke William III; six years later, when the personal union of the Netherlands and Luxembourg ended, Adolphe became Grand Duke of Luxembourg.

During the Nazi occupation in the Second World War the castle was used as a rest home for German artists and styled the Künstlerheim Fischbach. The designation did not protect it: a good part of its furnishings and art objects was looted, as happened at the other palaces in Luxembourg. Unlike those, however, Fischbach was not remodelled or partly demolished to suit the occupiers' intentions, and it was still habitable when Grand Duchess Charlotte returned from exile.

Charlotte lived at Fischbach from 1945 until her death in 1985. The other royal residences were unusable when she came back, but she took a liking to the place and stayed on even after Berg Castle and the Grand Ducal Palace had been fully restored — through the rest of her reign, and through the twenty-one years that followed her abdication in 1964.

In 1987 Prince Henri and Princess Maria Teresa moved in, and remained until Henri succeeded his father Jean as Grand Duke in 2000, when the two households changed places: Henri moved to Berg and his parents came from Berg to Fischbach. Joséphine-Charlotte died at the castle in 2005 and Jean lived on there until his own death on 23 April 2019. Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume and Hereditary Grand Duchess Stéphanie moved in late in 2019 after a year in London, and the castle was classified a national monument on 2 March 2022. After Guillaume's accession, he, Stéphanie and their sons Charles and François were due to move to a newly built cottage in the grounds of Berg Castle in 2026, returning Fischbach to Henri and Maria Teresa.