Qualla: Castle of Westerlo

Castle of Westerlo: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Micha de Vries from Middelburg, Nederland, CC BY 2.0. A devout countess kept her most precious possession on a small altar in the private chapel of her brand-new castle. The painting was three panels of oil on oak, made around 1428 by a Tournai master named Robert Campin, showing the Annunciation in a Flemish merchant's tidy parlor. After Jeanne de Mérode died in 1944, her heirs sold the Mérode Altarpiece to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It now lives at the Cloisters, six thousand kilometers from the Westerlo chapel where she prayed before it every morning. The castle she built is now the town hall. The painting is gone. The walls remember.

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Image: Micha de Vries from Middelburg, Nederland | CC BY 2.0

Castle of Westerlo: The Old Castle

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pvdz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Locals call it Oud Kasteel - the Old Castle - to tell it apart from its younger sibling a kilometer away. The donjon at its heart is the original, raised in local brown sandstone by the Lords of Wesemael in the late fourteenth century, walls more than two meters thick where the m...

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Image: Pvdz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Castle of Westerlo: A Garden Inspired by Versailles

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer), CC BY 4.0. Across the Nete river from the castle stretches sixty hectares of formal French landscape, a rectangular pond drawing the eye toward a distant point of perspective. Fieldmarshall Jean-Philippe-Eugène de Mérode-Westerloo commissioned it at the start of the eighteenth century after...

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Image: Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer) | CC BY 4.0

Castle of Westerlo: The Countess Who Stayed

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LeeKeoma, Public domain. Jeanne de Mérode was born in Paris in 1853, daughter of the Marquess of Westerlo and Princess Marie-Nicolette d'Arenberg. She never married. She devoted her inheritance to religion and to the people of Westerlo, financing a church, a school, a monastery in Heultje, a home for the...

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Image: LeeKeoma | Public domain

Castle of Westerlo: What the Castle Became

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pascal Van Acker, CC BY 4.0. When German troops crossed the border in May 1940 they took the New Castle for a local Nazi headquarters. Jeanne moved back to the Old Castle and died there on 1 July 1944, two months before liberation, ninety-one years old and never again to see her own bed. She left her castle ...

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Image: Pascal Van Acker | CC BY 4.0

Castle of Westerlo: What to Look For

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, CC BY 3.0. Two more castles complete the count. The Castle de Meeûs d'Argenteuil, in nearby Tongerlo, was built during and after the First World War by the Baron de Trannoy. Another, built in the 1920s by the Naets family of notaries, sits quietly among them - the youngest of Westerlo's acc...

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Image: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT | CC BY 3.0