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Some Belgian carnivals are called Laetare: a fitting name as it means "rejoice" in Latin. This cheerful tradition in La Louvière is over a hundred years old and the party lasts three days and three nights.
Le Laetare. A la Mi-Carême, La Louvière se réveille au son du roulement des tambours et du martèlement des sabots de ses Gilles. Issu d’une tradition vieille de 150 ans, le Carnaval du Laetare prend place dans la cité des Loups et, avec lui, trois jours d’un amusement intense autour d’un folklore chaleureux et accueillant.
The Carnival of La Louvière is called Laetare, after the Latin verb meaning “to enjoy” (the introit at mass on the fourth Sunday of Lent begins Laetare Jerusalem, Rejoice Jerusalem). It lasts three days, Sunday to Tuesday, and takes place in the middle of Lent.
The carnivals of Laetare, the fourth Sunday of Lent, are every bit as colourful as the festivities of Mardi Gras
- Hydraulic Boat Lifts
- Strépy-Thieu Boatlift
- Canal Du Centre
- Keramis-Centre de La Ceramique
- Mining Site Bois-du-Luc
- Musée Royal de Mariemont
- Mill
- Centre de La Gravure et de L’Image imprimée
- La Louve
- Domaine de La Louve
Bestriding the Canal du Centre close to La Louvière are four century-old technological marvels that look like they might have been dreamed up by H.G. Wells. These are hydraulic boat lifts, erected between 1888 and 1917 and designed to compensate for an elevation difference of more than 66 metres along just seven kilometres of the canal. In east- to...
As we’ll see, the Canal du Centre was widened in a long-term modern project, completed in 2002. This bypassed the old boatlifts, putting all their work on the shoulders of one record-breaking megastructure. Completed in 2002 after 20 years of construction, the Strépy-Thieu Boatlift was the tallest in the world at the time, at 102 metres and serving...
More on the actual waterway, which is just over 20 kilometres and links the Meuse with the Scheldt. This piece of infrastructure had been centuries in the pipeline as a means of transporting coal, but the almost 100-metre difference in elevation between the two rivers was prohibitive until human technology could catch up at the turn of the 20th cen...
The old, listed Boch earthenware manufactory on the edge of the city centre now holds this first-rate museum dedicated to ceramics. The Boch Collection is an extraordinary assemblage of 19th and 20th-century earthenware produced by this manufactory, with pieces by master craftsmen and feted industrial designers like Charles Catteau (1880-1966) who ...
Contributing to the Major Mining Sites of Wallonia UNESCO World Heritage Site is this coalmine just outside La Louvière that shut down in the 70s. Bois-du-Luc has a history going back 1685 but it’s the activity during the 19th century and the mine’s role during the Industrial Revolution that garners so much interest. What’s really compelling is the...
The industrialist and philanthropist Raoul Warocqué (1870-1917) bequeathed his sizeable and very eclectic collection of art and antiquities to the Belgian state when he passed away during the First World War. This initially came inside Warocqué’s lavish Neoclassical mansion, which burnt down in 1960, although its contents were saved. The current bu...
La Louvière’s Neoclassical former courthouse (1900) is the repository for the city’s art collection. MiLL opened here in 1987 and was given a renovation in the 2000s, with cartoon characters helping youngsters navigate the exhibits. The museum holds the largest number of works by Romanian-born 20th-century sculptor Idel Ianchelevici (1909-1994) of ...
This museum is devoted to engraving and contemporary printed art and has put together a hefty collection spanning the second half of the 20th century to the present. There are 10,000 individual prints, some 2,000 posters and 1,000 books and portfolios by 1,640 contemporary artists from Belgium and abroad. A whole spectrum of media is represented, f...
The name La Louvière derives from the Old French word Menaulu (meigne au leu), meaning “Wolf’s Lair”, and might have something to do with the high number of wolves living in what was then forest in Medieval times. Still, a name like La Louvière fires the imagination and at some point led to a Rome-like legend of a wolf nursing a human child. So gre...
For fresh air and greenery you need only travel a couple of kilometres south-west to this well-looked after public park. A large swathe of Domaine de la Louve has been allowed to grow out, and these flowery meadows are a haven for butterflies in the summer. There are more than 80 species of trees and shrubs in the park, and if you keep your eyes pe...
Belgian carnivals are sometimes called Laetare: a fitting name as it means to rejoice in Latin. Why not fill up your heart with joy in Tilff?
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Apr 3, 2017 · La Louvière is in an industrial area of Belgium and it along with several surrounding towns have been hosting these mid-Lent carnivals featuring local characters called “Gilles” since the 1800’s.
