Dinant, Walloon Region, Belgium
As a child I always heard about how flat Belgium is. When
Belgian friends and relatives visited us in the suburbs of Westchester County
outside of New York City, they always raved about how beautiful the scenery
was. It seemed pretty ordinary to me. When I first got to Belgium in 1985 I was told
the Ardennes were a lot like Switzerland, something I never really bought into,
but I knew there were hillier parts of the country.
In reading about Belgium over the years and tentatively planning
travel there, I was interested in Dinant, a place than in pictures usually
shows a big church with a big rock behind it and some kind of fort on top of
the rock. So I’ve long had it on my mind to go to Dinant, but I have to admit
that seeing it absolutely knocked my socks off. For some reason, I always
pictured the main part of town and the fort to be on the left bank (west side)
of the Meuse, but it is in fact on the right, which put it in spectacular light
on the sunny afternoon of my visit.
The other thing is that the Citadel more than 100 feet above
the river is in fact on top of an almost vertical cliff face, not just some
steep hill. It’s much higher than I expected.
I have to admit to being a bit of a slug; the cable car to the top from
town was included in the price of Citadel admission, so I figured, why not? I
did walk down, though. The Citadel had military value in the wars of the 1700s
and 1800s, but by WWI was decommissioned and was already a museum.
That doesn’t mean Dinant didn’t experience WWI fighting
during the German invasion in August 1914.
The town held out for a few days,
but after the German occupation started more than 700 civilians in the town
were killed in the first few days, accused of being irregular combatants.
Future French president Charles DeGaulle was also injured in the fighting in
Dinant, something that gets the main bridge across the Meuse in the city named
after him.
The Meuse is actually quite a significant river at Dinant.
Impressively, there are records that the Romans had built a bridge across the
Meuse at the spot of today’s Charles DeGaulle Bridge. Oh, and I wondered why
the bridge was decorated with multiple immense statues of saxophones. Adolf
Sax, inventor of the instrument, was born in Dinant. And Dinant is also the
home of Abbaye de Leffe, not a Trappist outfit but still the monks with whom
one of Belgium’s most famous export beers originates.
Although I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in Dinant, I saw
most of the limited number of real sights. I have to admit I really loved the
place, as I did Bouillon earlier in the day.
When I got back to my car early in the evening, I programmed the GPS to
find me the nearest campground. It was less than three miles south of town, up
in the hills and around some of the rock spires that dominate the area, run by
friendly Dutch people who assigned me a spot next to the field where the cows
graze. It was a beautiful night, and I woke up with a bunch of cows munching on
the grass around my rental car.
On the way to Namur in the morning I stopped at Crupet,
described as one of the prettiest villages in Wallonia. Part of the reason is a
moated 13th century tower house named Chateau des Carondolet in the
valley on the outskirts of town, but the chateau was totally covered with
scaffolding as part of its restoration, I didn’t even deem it worthwhile to
snap a picture. I didn’t find the rest of the village itself to be all that
outstanding but loved the farm scenery and small villages I had to drive
through to get there and onwards to Namur. It beats taking the highway any day
when you’re not in a rush to get somewhere.
2025-05-22