Round Hamont-Achel

This beautiful walk introduces you to Achel, a surprisingly charming town in the Belgian Kempen. You will find quiet and fragrant coniferous forests, an open agricultural landscape, but certainly also a surprising cultural history.

The beginning of the route takes you through the natural countryside of Achel. You walk through the Rozendaal Bos, a quiet and vast coniferous forest that has been planted on the former wasteland. Here and there you have beautiful views of the tranquil Limburg landscape with its meadows and old Kempen long-gable farms.

Walking through Achel, you can hardly imagine that this town formed a separate state in the early Middle Ages, together with Hamont and Sint-Huibrechts-Lille: the Grevenbroek seigniory. Achel is one of the villages where the so-called Teuten trade flourished. These Teuten were itinerant traders who traveled to areas in the Netherlands, Germany and France to offer their merchandise from door to door for about 9 months. They built some beautiful mansions in this area.

The last part of the route you walk through Achel-Statie, which is also called Rodenrijt after the fourteenth-century canon of the same name who owned a heritage here. Achelt-Statie is located on the former railway line 18, which connected Hasselt directly with Eindhoven from 1866 to 1959.

Like many other Belgian places, Achel also suffered from the First World War. Where the front line lay more to the southwest, Achel had to deal with De Draad, a kind of Iron Curtain with which the Germans wanted to prevent Belgians from fleeing to the neutral Netherlands. Achel initially came to lie behind this partition, so that the town was in a kind of no man's land between De Draad and the Dutch border. In 1916, the Germans moved De Draad to the actual national border after all, because the smuggling of goods and people from Achel was a thorn in their side.