Luxembourg Geography, Climate & Nature

Luxembourg is a landlocked country of 2,586 square kilometres in Western Europe, bordered by Belgium to the west and north, Germany to the east and France to the south and west, separated from the North Sea by Belgium. Its topography divides cleanly in two: the hilly Éislek, part of the Ardennes plateau, in the northern third, and the flat, fertile Gutland in the southern two-thirds, where the capital and most of the population are. The highest point is Kneiff near Wilwerdange at 560 metres, one metre above the Buurgplaatz that was thought highest until 1997; the lowest is the Moselle at Wasserbillig, 133 metres.

The longest river is the Sauer, a tributary of the Moselle, whose basin covers almost the whole country; the Alzette in the south and the Wiltz in the north are the others, and the Upper Sûre dam of the 1960s holds the drinking-water lake. Luxembourg City, at the confluence of the Alzette and Pétrusse, has 137,696 people, more than three times Esch-sur-Alzette, the second commune at 37,922; the airport is six kilometres to the east.

The Moselle valley in the south-east is the wine district, with the village of Schengen at the tripoint of Germany, France and Luxembourg; the Mullerthal in the east is sandstone cliffs and gorges; Vianden, Clervaux and Esch-sur-Sûre are the castle towns of the north.

Luxembourg has an oceanic climate, marked by high precipitation, particularly in late summer; summers are warm and winters cool, and the geography article calls it a temperate climate without extremes, with mild winters, fairly cool summers and high rainfall. The north, on the Ardennes plateau, is cooler and wetter than the Gutland; the Moselle valley in the south-east is warm and dry enough for vines.

The advisories' concerns are the roads: driving can be dangerous in autumn and winter because of fog and ice, and the tourist board's rules require winter tyres whenever snow, slush, black ice or frost affect the roads. No temperature figures are given in the sources opened for this page, and none are repeated here.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Luxembourg's nature is the managed nature of a small, rich, densely used country: the beech and oak forests of the Éislek and the Mullerthal, the sandstone gorges of the latter, the Moselle's vineyard slopes, and the Upper Sûre lake, created by a 1960s dam for drinking water and the centre of the country's nature park. The geography article names beech and oak as plentiful, with black alder and willow along the rivers, and describes the Gutland as farmed for fruit -- strawberries, apples, plums, cherries -- on fertile soil.

The encyclopaedia pages opened for this page carry no species inventory or protected-area count, and none is invented here. What can be said is structural: two-thirds of the country is farmed lowland, a third is Ardennes upland and forest, and the whole is crossed by the free trains that make the countryside reachable without a car.

No species-level survey was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

This page says only what its sources say, and on Luxembourg's wildlife they say nothing specific: the deer, boar and raptors of the Ardennes are in the country as they are across its borders, but no sentence opened for this page names them, so they stay out. The Éislek's forests and the Upper Sûre lake are where a naturalist would start.

The practical zoology is the advisories': nothing beyond the fog and ice on the roads, which is a compliment to the country.