Castle of Hollogne

The Castle of Hollogne in Grâce-Hollogne, Belgium, is a medieval castle complex that developed under feudal lords tied to the counts of Luxembourg and later evolved through the early modern period; the surviving buildings mainly date to the 17th and 18th centuries. The site served as the seat of a local seigneury and formed part of the manorial landscape that linked an abbey’s holdings with regional feudal courts, giving the estate an administrative and local judicial role in its region.

In the 1200s a representative of the Luxembourg household acted as the lord’s advocate for the estate, and his son secured legal possession of the lordship from the abbot in the early 14th century, by an act dated 4 November 1323. From that moment a branch of the Luxembourg family held the property through the late medieval centuries, anchoring the castle within the network of local feudal tenure.

That family line continued to hold the manor until the death of Gérard de Hollogne in 1664. Gérard’s son-in-law, Borchard-Guillaume, baron de Kinsky, succeeded to the title and links are recorded that place him in service to a foreign crown. A later generation, Guillaume-Maurice, lost the estate through a seizure that transferred control to Barbe de Noville, the widow of a Liège alderman who died in 1719.

Barbe de Noville’s heir restored the seigneury’s standing at the abbey in 1729 and then sold the lordship in 1757 to Jacques-Nicolas-Joseph de Coune, an alderman of Liège. The de Coune family retained the estate until the upheavals at the end of the 18th century, a period that saw renewed claims from the Kinsky line between 1782 and 1792 and which ended for many noble holdings with the French Revolution, when feudal privileges were abolished. In the 19th century the property passed into private hands and was bought by Pierre Mottard, who later left it to his son-in-law, the baron de Lhonneux. A further transfer in the early 20th century links the site to a member of the Lhonneux family.

In 1957 Alice Van Zuylen, a descendant of the Lhonneux line, gave the castle for the benefit of disadvantaged children. From that year a Liège organization established a summer camp at the estate that runs from 1 July to 14 August and accommodates many children each day. The property also began to be used as group accommodation after the mid-20th century change of ownership. In November 1963 Baron Frédéric Van Zuylen placed the castle’s family archives with the State Archives in Liège.