Namur

Namur began as a trading settlement in Celtic times, where routes across the Ardennes met at the confluence of the Sambre and the Meuse. The Romans followed Julius Caesar's defeat of the local Aduatuci, and in the early Middle Ages the Merovingians built a castle on the rocky spur above the rivers. In the 10th century Namur became a county in its own right; its counts could build only on the north bank of the Meuse, because the south bank, which grew into Jambes, belonged to the prince-bishops of Liège. Philip the Good of Burgundy bought the county in 1421.

The citadel made the town a prize. Strengthened in the 1640s under Spanish rule, it was captured by Louis XIV in 1692 and rebuilt by Vauban, then retaken by William III of Orange in 1695. Under the Barrier Treaty the Dutch garrisoned the fortress while the Austrians ruled the town, and the French besieged and annexed it again in the 1790s. After Belgian independence in 1830 Namur stayed a garrison town until the citadel was decommissioned in 1891 in favour of a ring of outlying forts.

Those forts did not save it in August 1914, when the Germans bombarded the town without warning and the supposedly impregnable defences fell in three days. Namur was in the front line again in 1940 and in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Paratroopers were based here until 1977. When Wallonia gained its own government, Namur was chosen as its seat and in 1986 was declared the regional capital, despite being smaller than Liège or Charleroi.

Namur's best-known tradition is jousting on stilts, practised since at least 1411. Two teams, the Mélans and the Avresses, dressed in medieval clothes, try to topple each other on one of the main squares, and the year's biggest bout, the fight for the Golden Stilt, takes place on the third Sunday in September during the Fêtes de Wallonie. Since 2021 the jousts have been on UNESCO's list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the belfry is a World Heritage Site too, so the city counts two UNESCO entries.

Walloon is cherished alongside French. The city hymn, Li Bia Bouquet, was composed in Walloon in 1851 by Nicolas Bosret, the blind organist of the church of Saint-Loup, and the house of Walloon and folklore on Rue Saint-Nicolas is the base of the stilt-walkers and other folk societies.

As a university and capital city, Namur has a full cultural calendar: the Festival International du Film Francophone each September since 1986, the Namur en Mai street-arts festival, the free Verdur music festival in June, the KIKK festival and, in October, a nature film festival. Sport means the cyclo-cross World Cup round on the citadel's slopes and the memory of the motocross Grand Prix, held around the citadel from 1950 to 2007 and once called the Monaco of motocross.

The municipality had 115,029 inhabitants on 1 January 2025, spread over 175 square kilometres that take in the old city and some two dozen former villages, including Jambes, Wépion, Malonne, Bouge and Saint-Servais. French is the language of daily life. Jambes, across the Meuse, has its own station and shopping, while the villages on the plateaus are quiet residential places.

Government is the backbone of the economy: the Walloon parliament, government and administration are all here, and the city is also the capital of the province of Namur. The University of Namur, founded in 1831, brings a large student population, and the UCLouvain Namur university hospital is the province's largest employer. The city also has a commercial and industrial side on the Sambre and Meuse valley, producing machinery, leather goods, metals and porcelain, and barges pass through the middle of town on the Meuse.

Daily rhythms follow the working week of a capital city. The station, the busiest in Wallonia, fills with commuters each morning; the shopping streets between the station, Rue de Fer and Rue de l'Ange are busy on Saturdays, when the market and a flea market take over the centre; and Sundays bring a flea market to Jambes. Location at the head of the Ardennes also makes the city a stop for visitors heading south.

Namur's most prized local product grows a few kilometres upriver: Wépion strawberries, cultivated for more than 150 years on sun-exposed, west-facing slopes with their own micro-climate, are an established name in Belgian cooking, and the village also produces a strawberry beer.

The Meuse valley has a claim on one of Belgium's national foods. The Belgian journalist Jo Gérard claimed that a family manuscript of 1781 recounts potatoes being deep-fried in the Meuse valley before 1680, in place of fish when the rivers froze. Today they are bought from a friterie in a paper cone with the sauce on top. Walloon cooking around the city borrows from its neighbours: jambon d'Ardenne, smoked ham and game pâté from the forests to the south; boulets à la liégeoise, two big meatballs in a sweet-and-sour sauce called sauce lapin; and the Liège waffle.

Abbey products are a speciality of the surrounding countryside. Maredsous makes cheeses in its own dairy, though the beer bearing its name is now brewed in Flanders. The old town's chocolate shops and cafés serve thick hot chocolate and waffles.