At first sight the “vallée de la Chiers” looks peaceful, even abandoned. But then an old steam locomotive chugs into sight moving towards a small station. Fond-de-Gras is the name of this hidden-away place. It is situated in the heart of the Luxemburg ore basin. Not so long ago the area was full of industry: collieries, open-pit mines and blast furnaces. Nowadays the region bears witness to a century of industrial history in idyllic surroundings. A journey back in time begins with the descent into Pétange nearby – in a train dating back to 1900. It’s an eight kilometre journey from Fonds-de-Gras. But the journey of discovery is by no means at an end. There stands a disused steam-driven electricity power station. And not far away there’s an engine shed full of old locomotives and wagons. Workers’ dwellings, complete with an original collier’s pub and an old grocery store recount the living conditions of the miners who once worked here. A journey along the “Minieresbunn”, a narrow-gauge railway, will take you down into the underground world of galleries and gangways in a nearby colliery. When you emerge once more you can take a stroll through the old working-class village of Lasauvage – through streets which have scarcely changed over the last one hundred years or so.

It is difficult to believe but the roots of the Luxemburg iron ore industry are located in the rolling hillsides around Lamadelaine and Rodange. Their centre was the “vallée de la Chiers” on the borders of France and Belgium. The layers of ore sometimes ran immediately beneath the surface and at the end of the 19th century the area became a target for Belgian ironworks under the name Fond-de-Gras. The first step to opening up the region was to build a railway from Pétange via Fond-de-Gras to the French border which was opened in 1879. A huge number of ironworks and collieries soon sprung up. These included the Dhoil Pit (1908) which is now open to the general public once again. The new industries attracted a vast amount of workers. Around 1880 the small nearby hamlet of Lasauvage could boast of almost 1000 inhabitants and in the following years it grew even further with the addition of row upon row of two-storey terraced housing, a typical building pattern of the time. Fond-de-Gras flourished between 1900 and 1940, but the last ore galleries were closed down as early as 1950. When a landslide buried a section of the railway line to Pétange in 1964 the region was in danger of disappearing into oblivion. Thanks to the enthusiasm of a few railway lovers it was spared this fate. They restored a section of the old railway line and a steam locomotive, thereby creating a tourist attraction. In 1986 the State Monument Protection Office declared that the whole location be renamed as the “Fond-de-Gras Industrial and Railway Park”. This area comprises the remaining industrial plants, the housing and the railway lines in the vallée de la Chiers, as well as the historic railway lines to Pétange and the Dhoil pit. Lasauvage is also included. Thus Fond-de-Gras today embodies a century of living industrial history in the midst of an attractive landscape park.