Towns and villages in Luxembourg

Talk of towns in Luxembourg needs a change of scale. Outside the capital, no commune reaches 40,000 people, and many of those with town status would pass for large villages anywhere else. Here I rank the country’s hundred communes by size and tell you which ones deserve a visit and why.

A hundred communes, 565 localities

Luxembourg has been organised into 100 communes since 1 September 2023, spread across 12 cantons. The commune is the municipality, and each one can contain many villages. Clervaux, for instance, covers 25 localities and Wincrange 27. The national register counts 565 in total. To find which canton a commune falls in, see cantons of Luxembourg.

The biggest are in the south

The capital, Luxembourg City, had 137,678 people on 1 January 2026, more than three times the next largest. After it comes a block from the mining south, Esch-sur-Alzette with 38,275, Differdange with 31,421, Dudelange with 22,379 and Pétange with 21,290, all inside the Minett biosphere reserve. That’s the legacy of steel. The government portal notes that before steel, Luxembourg was a country people left, and that the mills then drew in Germans and Italians.

Of these, the one I’d visit is Esch-sur-Alzette, for Belval, where you can climb blast furnace A to a platform 40 m up, and for the National Resistance Museum. Differdange has the old mining village of Lasauvage within its boundaries, and Dudelange the Petite Italie district.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Luxembourg before prices climb.

Twelve towns with the title

Twelve communes carry the legal title of «ville», or town, and it has nothing to do with size. They are Diekirch, Differdange, Dudelange, Echternach, Esch-sur-Alzette, Ettelbruck, Grevenmacher, Luxembourg, Remich, Rumelange, Vianden and Wiltz. Vianden has the title with 2,243 people, while Hesperange, nearing 17,300, doesn’t. It makes no difference to a visitor, but it explains why some villages present themselves as towns.

The capital is in a league of its own

Luxembourg City plays a different game. It covers 51.73 km², is split into 24 official districts from the Grund to the Kirchberg, and 70.8% of its residents are foreign nationals, well above the 46.6% for the country as a whole. The city publishes its own count too, 137,696 people on 31 December 2025, very close to STATEC’s. For visitors it’s the natural base and the town that deserves the most days, at least one full one.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Luxembourg before prices climb.

The ones I’d visit

For me, the ones that most repay a trip are the small ones. Echternach, the oldest town in the country, with 6,031 people, the Basilica of St Willibrord and the start of the Mullerthal Trail. Vianden, with its castle above the Our. Clervaux, which doesn’t have town status but does have The Family of Man. And on the Moselle, Remich, with its 3 km riverside promenade.

In the north, Diekirch and Ettelbruck make up the Nordstad, as Visit Luxembourg calls it, and each has a Second World War museum, the National Museum of Military History in the first and the General Patton Memorial Museum in the second. Wiltz has its castle with brewing and Battle of the Bulge museums and a festival in the open-air theatre. The prettiest villages, scored, are in the prettiest villages in Luxembourg.

The smallest

At the other end are Saeul, in Redange canton, with 1,081 people, Putscheid (1,191), Kiischpelt (1,309), Fischbach (1,344) and Bech (1,370). They’re rural communes, almost all in the north or the Mullerthal, and some have a surprise. Saeul has what the tourist board calls the oldest oak in Luxembourg; Putscheid has Stolzembourg and its old copper mine; and Bech has the Bildchen, an oak more than 500 years old at Altrier.

If you would rather have a local show you round, book a guided tour in Luxembourg and choose by the reviews.

Getting between them

They’re all reachable by public transport, for free, and mobiliteit.lu has train and bus times nationwide. For the smallest villages of the Éislek, a car saves a lot of waiting. Within the capital, tram line T1 runs from Findel airport through the centre and the station to Stadion, 24 stops in all. My advice is not to try to tick off lots of towns in one day, however close together they look on the map. Pick a region, pick two or three places in it, and leave room for a long lunch. Luxembourg is better with two or three stops and time to walk.

A car frees you from timetables: search car hire in Luxembourg on DiscoverCars and compare companies.

So you do not pay over the odds, look at trains, coaches and flights to Luxembourg on Omio and pick the one that suits you.