My feet are getting used to walking and, although I am fully aware that I will eventually regret saying this, the truth is that today's walk was a bit short. It was 14 kilometres from Bascharage to Kleinbettingen, passing through Grass and Kahler. After so many days of traversing the dry lands of the south, I let myself be immersed in Luxembourg's Wild West.
At first glance, the West is easier to get around. The paths are mostly flat, there is shade everywhere, and much of the route is on a bicycle path - so there are always people passing from one side to the other, which greatly reduces the feeling of loneliness. This is a curious ambiguity, because this is the loneliest part of the country. The West is the region where the fewest people live in all of Luxembourg.
Three of the five smallest populated communes in the Grand Duchy are in the West - including the two smallest of all, Saeul and Wahl. And that feeling is immediate as soon as you arrive. The villages are small and pastoral, with large barns and stables but little infrastructure for the population. The fields are ploughed, and on the side roads you are more likely to find horses or tractors than cars or buses. It is a territory somehow lost in time.
And overwhelming, too. Upon arriving in Kahler, however, I felt like I needed to pinch myself. The facades of the houses, the stables, and the farms are decorated with large murals that take up entire walls and turn a small village near the Belgian border into an unlikely outdoor urban art museum.
On the way, shortly before, I had been joined by Alain Welter, whom friends jokingly named the King of Kahler, and who is actually the inventor of it all. "I got tired of seeing the place where I grew up being a place to pass through and wanted to make it a place to stop," he told me when we hit the road. When he was a kid, there was a coffee shop, a store, and a grocery store here.
"Everything gradually closed down and a feeling of abandonment set in," he explains with two cans of paint in his hand. "Then, with the arrival of the housing crisis and thousands of people moving across the border, Kahler began to suffer from chaotic traffic. To escape the traffic jams on the freeway people started coming this way and destroying the peacefulness we were used to. Suddenly we had the worst of the city and the worst of the countryside," he says.
The change came five years ago. Welter went to Berlin to study illustration, where he fell in love with graffiti and urban arts. As an end-of-course project, he decided to paint a mural in his home village. "It was hard to convince people to give me their facades, but after I did the first one the other neighbours were already coming to ask me to paint their walls," he laughs.
He has always used the elements of local life as inspiration: animals and agriculture, cycling and the memory of those who made the land remarkable - and painted them on the walls. In 2018, he organised a festival with art workshops and concerts, invited more artists to paint murals, and spread a new motto for an abandoned place around the country: Make Koler Kooler. Today people come from all over Europe to see the transformation. And, in a way, Kahler has become the centre of a brave new world. "It's really cool, don't you think? And I'm not done here yet," he says.