Junglinster was a very different kind of stop from some of the prettier places we had visited in Luxembourg. We did not come here for a dramatic landscape, a castle or a famous old centre. What we found instead was something extremely useful when travelling by motorhome: an official place where we could stop without paying, in a town with shops and other facilities nearby, and where we could feel comfortable without having to think too much about the logistics. The motorhome spaces are tucked into one corner of a much larger public car park in the commercial area of Junglinster. At first sight it is not particularly attractive and certainly not the sort of place we would choose purely for the scenery, but in practice we liked it considerably more than its surroundings suggested. There are only three official bays for motorhomes, and this was the main weakness of the place. They are quite small and the ground is uneven, so this is not an area with generous individual pitches where a larger vehicle can spread out comfortably. With a 23-foot-long motorhome, the limited size was immediately noticeable. Nevertheless, we managed without any real problem. The rest of the car park is much larger, which makes manoeuvring around the area relatively straightforward even though the three official spaces themselves are restricted. Most importantly for us, parking was completely free of charge. We did not use any of the motorhome services during our stop. There was a service point beside the parking spaces and everything around it looked very clean and tidy, although at night it appeared to us that the facilities might have been closed. We were not certain about that, so we would not rely on the services being available at every hour. This did not matter to us because we did not need them, and our experience of the parking itself was positive. Despite being in a commercial area and surrounded by buildings rather than countryside, it was surprisingly quiet and peaceful while we were there. We felt quite safe, nobody bothered us and there was none of the uncomfortable atmosphere that can sometimes make a perfectly legal urban parking place feel unsuitable for a motorhome. That was probably what made Junglinster work so well for us. It did not pretend to be a campsite or a scenic motorhome destination. It was simply a practical, free place where we could leave the vehicle and feel comfortable. Junglinster itself is much older and more interesting than the commercial surroundings of the parking area suggest. The name appears in written records as Lincera as early as 867, making the settlement more than eleven centuries old. For much of its history it was connected with the lordship of Linster and with nearby Bourglinster, whose castle began developing during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The present parish church in Junglinster was built between 1772 and 1774, but one of its most unusual details is hidden below the building: because of the damp ground, the entire church stands on oak piles driven into the soil. Its right-hand side altar originally came from the chapel of Bourglinster Castle. None of this is particularly obvious from the commercial part of town where we stopped, which made the contrast quite interesting. Junglinster has expanded considerably and today functions partly as a residential and commercial centre east of Luxembourg City, but only a short distance from the large roads and shops there are fields, forests and an extensive network of walking routes. The municipality has more than 250 kilometres of marked paths spread over 27 trails, which is an unusually large network for one Luxembourg commune. Some routes pass through Junglinster itself, others head towards Bourglinster Castle, the Grünewald forest and landscapes leading towards the Mullerthal. One of the easier walks, the J5, makes a loop of roughly six and a half kilometres around Junglinster and passes the parish church before returning through wooded higher ground. Longer routes reach the Weimericht-Doulen nature reserve or the historic plateau south of Bourglinster. The area therefore changes very quickly once you move away from the main road. Something else makes Junglinster unexpectedly important in twentieth-century European history. On the outskirts of the town stand the huge radio masts associated with Radio Luxembourg. Construction of the original transmitting station began here in October 1931, and on 15 March 1933 Radio Luxembourg began regular long-wave broadcasting from Junglinster using what was then the most modern and powerful radio transmitter in Europe. The station eventually became famous far beyond Luxembourg. Radio Luxembourg broadcast across national borders at a time when most European broadcasting was still dominated by state organisations, and its programmes became particularly important in countries where commercial popular radio was limited. For generations of British listeners, Radio Luxembourg and later the famous medium-wave “208” service provided an alternative to the BBC and helped popularise new music across Europe. Junglinster was therefore not merely the location of a local radio mast; for decades signals from this small Luxembourg town reached millions of listeners across the continent. A new medium-wave transmitter was inaugurated at Junglinster in 1951, helping Radio Luxembourg’s English-language service expand further. In 1972 the enormous new long-wave transmitting station at nearby Beidweiler took over the principal role, while Junglinster remained available as a reserve and continued to be used for other transmissions. The radio history is one of those details that completely changes how the town feels once you know about it. The same relatively quiet place where we stopped with the motorhome had once been one of the centres of European broadcasting. The transmitter site was sufficiently powerful and technically unusual that a radio-interference phenomenon first observed in connection with it became known internationally as the “Luxembourg effect”. Junglinster’s location also made sense for us as travellers because it sits between Luxembourg City and the more rural eastern part of the country. Luxembourg City is not far away, while the countryside around Mullerthal and Echternach begins in the other direction. Public transport is particularly useful because ordinary buses, trams and second-class trains within Luxembourg are free, so leaving a motorhome outside the capital and continuing by bus can be far easier than driving a seven-metre vehicle into the centre. We did not need Junglinster to be beautiful for it to be useful. In fact, that was probably the point of the stop. After many places where we had to think about parking charges, small bays, prohibitions, unclear overnight rules or whether a larger motorhome would fit at all, here the essential things were simple. The designated motorhome section was small and uneven, and with only three official spaces it could clearly fill very quickly, but during our visit the place itself worked well. It cost us nothing, everything around the service area appeared clean and well maintained, it was quiet and peaceful and we felt safe. Nobody disturbed us. Junglinster therefore became one of those stops that we remember less for what we saw from the windscreen and more for how straightforward it made travelling. The surroundings of the car park were ordinary, but behind them was a town with more than a thousand years of history, an enormous network of countryside walks and one of the most remarkable broadcasting stories in Europe. It was a good reminder that some of the most useful motorhome stops do not need to be spectacular. Sometimes a free, calm and safe place where everything simply works is exactly what we need.
