History accompanies me on my hike across Luxembourg. By closely observing the forest it is possible to see what has happened to a country, and in the woods of southern Luxembourg, this is particularly visible. You leave Dudelange and the forests open up in front of you. Red soil, undergrowth, round-topped trees.
"It feels like we're in the savannah, beware of the lions," a friend who decided to join me on this part of the hike said to me. I laughed. And then the landscape changed.
Rocks, rocks and more rocks - now covered in moss - in the middle of nowhere. There were holes and precipices just before the trail led us to Rumelange, where the pebbles ripped from the mines and quarries of the region. Fifty years of abandoning the subsoil allowed nature to regain its space. But the industrial assertion of the Grand Duchy has also left its mark. And it is precisely the revitalisation of those marks that is now changing the south.
"Since the collapse of the mining industry, the Minett region has been abandoned," Henri Haine, the mayor of Rumelange, told me when I came across him at the National Mining Museum. "When I grew up, this was the centre of the world. We were all miners’ children and grandchildren, there was a sense of pride in the work. The last mines closed in 1981 and the land began to languish."
From a population of 7,000 in 1906, the town went down to 3,000 in the late 1980s. "Commerce halved, banks closed their branches, Post disappeared earlier this year. Anyone who grew up in the Minett knows that there is a terrible sense of abandonment,” the mayor said.
I continued on the road to Esch-sur-Alzette to walk with historian Denis Klein. "This is where Luxembourg's wealth was born. Before iron mining began in the 1860s, the country was simply miserable," he said.
But then whole cities were built in places where there were once nothing but farms. People began hiring workers from the north of the country, then from Italy, and some from Poland. The world lived on steel, until steel stopped being profitable.
"From the beginning an effort was made to preserve the industrial memory of the past," Klein said. "The mine museum and the Lasauvage railroad are, after all, 50 years old. But for some time now there has been a more profound revolution."
The Belval furnaces have been transformed into a university and a new innovation centre. The old ruins are being turned into arts centres and technology hubs. More and more people are researching and reinventing the past. Last year the industrial region was declared the European Capital of Culture and a Unesco biosphere reserve.
The ruins which were, until recently, abandoned are now a token of updated, modernised pride for Luxembourg.
"It's as if they decided to return to the surface from the bowels of the earth to claim their importance,” Klein said. The pride of the south is alive again.