GR 571 Stage 5: Vielsalm to Gouvy and the halfway point

GR 571 Stage 5 is a gentle walk through the valley of the Counts of Salm, past medieval towers and whetstone quarries, to the high Ardennes plateau. UPDATED APRIL 2026

Route at a glance

• Distance: 17 km
• Elevation gain: Approx. 479 m, but spread gradually over the full stage; no single brutal climb
• Duration: 5-6.5 hours walking time
• Difficulty: Moderate. It’s the most walker-friendly of the five stages, with the last 6 km a gentle descent into Gouvy
• Start: Vielsalm railway station (Liège-Luxembourg line; 1 km walk to GR trail start)
• End: Gouvy railway station (same Liège-Luxembourg line)
• Train access: Both start and finish are on the same line, so changes required. Timetables: belgiantrain.be
• Key landmarks: Forest of Le Bonalfa, Salmchâteau (château ruins, coticule museum), village of Cierreux, Ardennes plateau, Gouvy
• Best season: Year-round: the gentler terrain makes this viable even in late autumn; spring offers the best birdwatching
• Supplies: No shops or cafés on the route between Vielsalm and Gouvy — carry water and food for the full day
• GPX / map: RouteYou or Wikiloc etc (search GR 571 Stage 5). Topo-guide from grsentiers.org

Stage Five: The gentle stage

After four stages of steep climbs, brutal cold, precarious bridge crossings, and one of the hardest ascents in Belgium, Stage 5 of the GR 571 comes as something close to a gift. It is the route’s quietest, most contemplative stage. The day moves through landscape rather than battling it, following the Salm valley south through forests and meadows before climbing gradually to the high Ardennes plateau and descending into the small railway town of Gouvy.

There are no chair-lifts to shame you. No frozen campsites. No Chefna river demanding that you crawl across on your hands and knees. Stage 5 is a walking day in the true sense: a day for moving through the landscape and actually looking at it, noticing what lives in it, and arriving at the end feeling pleasantly tired rather than structurally compromised.

That said, it does have a story. The Salm valley is old. The Counts of Salm ruled here for four centuries and left their mark on every village name. And the geology under your feet as you pass through Salmchâteau is found nowhere else on earth. Gouvy, where the stage ends, has a wartime story of extraordinary doggedness that deserves to be told.

I walked this stage on a cold April morning, setting off before the rest of Vielsalm was awake. The silver lining of a frigid night in a caravan is a very early start. And a very early start in the Ardennes forest in spring means something that all the history in the world cannot quite match: birdsong.

Getting there and getting home

Stage 5 is the most logistically straightforward of all five stages on the southbound GR 571. Both Vielsalm and Gouvy are served by the same Liège-Luxembourg railway line, and no changes are required on either journey. From Liège-Guillemins the trip takes around 50 minutes to Vielsalm; Gouvy to Liège takes around an hour. Check timetables at belgiantrain.be.

The GR 571 trail starts about 1 km from Vielsalm station. From the platform, follow the path opposite the stairs and turn right at the road, heading uphill until you reach the junction with Rue du Bonalfa. The waymarkers take over from there.

If you want to break the stage into two days, Salmchâteau (around the halfway point) has limited accommodation options. Gouvy itself has guesthouses and B&Bs well placed for walkers arriving by train.

The walk: Vielsalm to Gouvy

Dawn chorus in Le Bonalfa forest

The GR 571 leaves Vielsalm station and climbs immediately into the forest of Le Bonalfa, rising sometimes steeply through mixed woodland. This is the day’s main ascent, and it comes right at the start. The rest of the stage is mostly a long, gradual descent punctuated by the rolling farmland and stream valleys of the high Ardennes.

In early spring, the timing of the forest climb coincides with something remarkable. The Ardennes dawn chorus in April is a joyful natural experience. and if you start early enough to be in the trees as the light comes up, the number of species singing simultaneously is genuinely astonishing. On my walk I counted twenty-one species within the first hour alone.

The roll call worth mentioning: six species of tit (blue, coal, great, crested, willow, and long-tailed). Wren and goldcrest, both tiny birds. Chaffinch, bullfinch, greenfinch and goldfinch. Robins and blackbirds in quantity, song thrushes and a mistle thrush. Nuthatches (half a dozen) and a treecreeper working the bark methodically. A dunnock, quiet and self-effacing as always.

And, best of all, the chiffchaff. Two plain notes repeated endlessly, nothing melodically interesting about it whatsoever. But the chiffchaff is the first summer migrant to arrive from Africa. Sometimes it appears as early as the third week in March. Its song, however simple, is the sound of the season turning. Warmer days. New leaves. Rising sap. I will never not stop to listen to a chiffchaff.

Outside Salmchâteau, a large mixed flock of fieldfares and redwings – winter visitors heading north to Scandinavia for the summer – were feeding in the fields. Late March and early April is the brief window when both winter and summer migrants are present simultaneously.

The descent to Salmchâteau

From the high point of Le Bonalfa the path descends through the forest towards Salmchâteau.

The topo-guide carries an unusual warning: watch your step on the way down, because the ground is pocked with hidden hollows. These are the overgrown remnants of coticule extraction pits, now invisible under vegetation but capable of catching an ankle unawares. The geology here is unlike anything else on the route.

Salmchâteau itself sits in the Salm valley at the foot of the descent, with the ruins of the Counts of Salm’s castle visible as you approach. The village is small and quiet, straddling the river, with a baker’s and a café if you need to stop. The old château’s twin medieval towers are about all that remains of what was once a substantial fortress.

Cierreux and the Ardennes plateau

After Salmchâteau the route crosses the river and climbs again, more gently, through farming country towards the village of Cierreux. The landscape opens up here. The enclosed forest gives way to broad meadows, long views, and the sense of arriving on higher ground. This is the Ardennes plateau proper, austere and beautiful, at altitudes above 500 metres.

Beyond Cierreux the path follows a long, easy descent through stream valleys and mixed forest for the final six kilometres to Gouvy. This is the stage’s reward for the morning’s climbing: a relaxed, scenically varied walk-in, the hills on either side becoming gentler, the sound of the Glain stream (marked on maps as the Salm, but more correctly the Glain; a cartographic error that has persisted for centuries) accompanying the path intermittently.

I made Gouvy in time for my train. A most enjoyable day’s walking.

The history along the way

The Counts of Salm and their valley

The entire length of Stage 5 runs through territory that was once the Comté de Salm. This was a medieval county that shaped this corner of the Ardennes for four centuries. The Salm dynasty traced its origins to the Lotharingian nobility of the tenth century. By the eleventh century a branch of the family had established itself in the valley that takes their name, controlling the land between what is now Vielsalm and Salmchâteau.

The name Vielsalm itself means ‘Old Salm’; the original settlement in the valley, predating the new seat of power. When the counts built a new château downstream between 1307 and 1362, the settlement that grew around it became ‘Salma Nova’, which contracted over time into Salmchâteau.

The château you pass on Stage 5 is this second building: a proper fortress, built directly onto bedrock with walls five metres thick, the two surviving entrance towers still imposing despite centuries of neglect. Its cellars served as a gaol for criminals and for those accused of witchcraft. The Ardennes saw thousands of witch trials between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the county of Salm was not immune.

The counts rarely lived here in person; the valley was administered rather than inhabited by its rulers. After the last Counts of Salm died out in the late medieval period, the property passed through various noble hands before the French Revolution swept the old feudal structures away entirely. The ruins are privately owned today, but the two towers remain visible from the road.

The Coticule: A stone found nowhere else on earth

As you descend through the forest above Salmchâteau, the ground beneath you contains something remarkable. The region between La Baraque de Fraiture and Salmchâteau sits above a geological layer of coticule. This is an Ordovician metamorphic rock formed around 480 million years ago. It consists of microscopic garnet crystals bonded with mica and volcanic ash. It is found in thin seams, typically 5 to 25 centimetres wide, running through the darker schist.

Its significance is practical and historically extraordinary: coticule is the finest natural whetstone ever discovered. The garnet crystals (30 to 42% of the rock by composition) have a precise dodecahedral geometry that gives them exactly the right cutting angle to hone metal to extraordinary sharpness without leaving microscopic burrs. No synthetic material has precisely replicated it. No other geological deposit anywhere in the world matches it.

Quarrying began in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, coticule was being exported to Venice, London, Moscow, and Smyrna. At its peak in the early twentieth century it reached every inhabited continent: barbers and surgeons in Kenya, Norway, the United States, and India all used it. The stone became known internationally as the ‘Stone of Vielsalm.’ The work was entirely manual, dangerous, and poorly paid: apprentices started at fourteen, and ten-hour days were standard before 1921.

The industry declined after the Second World War, undercut by synthetic alternatives and the disappearance of the straight-razor shaving market. But one quarry in nearby Lierneux still operates today, exporting most of its production to the United States, where coticule remains prized by blade enthusiasts and craftsmen. The old pits above Salmchâteau, including those hidden hollows the topo-guide warns you about on the descent, are the physical remnants of this four-century industry.

The Musée du Coticule in Salmchâteau, housed in a former workshop from 1922, tells the full story with working machines, geological exhibits, and historical displays. It is a small museum with an unexpectedly global reach.

The River Salm that isn’t: a cartographer’s error

The river you follow on this stage is labelled the Salm on every map and signpost. It isn’t. The correct name is the Glain. This is the river that gives its name to the ancient domain of Glain, which existed in this valley long before the Counts of Salm arrived. The domain of Glain predated the county, and naturally lent its name to the watercourse that rose within it.

When the County of Salm grew in power and prestige, its name gradually displaced the older toponym in everyday speech. People downstream began referring to the river’s origin as ‘the Salm valley’ rather than ‘the Glain valley.’ A cartographer recorded this colloquial usage as fact, and the error (the Glain renamed Salm) was reproduced on maps ever since. It persists to this day. The topo-guide to the GR 571 flags it, which is a small act of historical justice.

Gouvy: The garrison that held

Gouvy sits at the junction of the Liège-Luxembourg railway line and the road network that, in December 1944, connected the Allied front lines with their supply bases to the west. This made it, briefly, one of the most strategically contested small towns in the Battle of the Bulge.

From October 1944, the 89th Quartermaster Railhead Company, and its truck drivers, clerks, and labourers, had been running a ration distribution depot in Gouvy, supplying food to American units across a wide front. On 18 December 1944, two days after the German offensive began at the Losheim Gap to the east, retreating American units began passing through the town. At noon, telephone contact with Corps headquarters went dead. German armour and infantry were closing in from the direction of St. Vith.

The quartermaster company attempted to evacuate. Their convoy was blocked two hundred yards out of town by burning vehicles on the only road west. They returned to Gouvy, extinguished fires in the ration dumps, and prepared to defend a position they had not been trained, equipped, or intended to hold.

For four days (18 to 22 December 1944) a force of service troops, separated soldiers from other units, and an Ordnance platoon held Gouvy against German tank attacks, artillery fire, and infantry sorties. They established two roadblocks, dug two-man foxholes in a perimeter around the town, and continued distributing rations to any American unit with enough strength to reach them. Some 15,000 daily rations went out during the siege. At one point, fifty Germans concealed themselves under hay in two wagons and attempted to enter the village; almost all were killed. German prisoners revealed that a full division had been tasked with taking Gouvy.

On the morning of 22 December, the garrison received orders to evacuate in five minutes. Within two hours of their departure, German armour occupied the town. In four days of fighting, the ‘garrison of Gouvy’ had killed approximately seventy Germans, captured twenty-two, and suffered only two wounded and eight missing.

Sixty years later, one of the soldiers who served in Gouvy in the autumn of 1944 returned for the first time since the war. He was a 19-year-old military policeman named George Merz. He found, in the local tourist information centre, a photograph of himself and three fellow soldiers standing beside the remains of a V1 rocket. He had stayed with a local family, the Lallemands, who had fed him and made him feel at home. ‘The fondest memories I have from my time at war,’ he wrote, ‘stem from the two quiet months I spent living with a family in the small Belgian town of Gouvy.’

That, too, is Gouvy’s history: not just the siege, but the kindness before it.

The halfway point

Gouvy marks the approximate midpoint of the GR 571. The five stages described in this series (from Comblain-au-Pont to Gouvy) cover around 88 km of the route’s total 185 km. These are the stages that follow the Liège-Luxembourg railway line, making them accessible as individual day walks or multi-day segments without a car.

The remaining stages from Gouvy continue westward and then north through the high Ardennes. They are different in character from the river-valley walking of the southern route, moving through plateau country and forest before eventually looping back north towards Comblain-au-Pont. They are more logistically demanding, generally requiring pre-arranged transport rather than a convenient train. But the landscape of the full circuit is extraordinary, and if you have completed all five of these stages, you have a sense of why.

The other stages of the GR 571

Here are the four preceding stages of the southern leg of the GR 571, a 185 km circular route through the Belgian Ardennes:

• Stage 1: Comblain-au-Pont to Aywaille
• Stage 2: Aywaille to Stoumont
• Stage 3: Stoumont to Trois-Ponts
• Stage 4: Trois-Ponts to Vielsalm
• Stage 5: Vielsalm to Gouvy

A final note on GR 571 Stage 5

GR 571 Stage 5 is the stage I return to in memory when I want to remember why I walk. Not for the drama (Stage 3 has Peiper’s tanks and Stage 2 has those footbridges over the Chefna that I still cannot think about without a mild sense of vertigo). Stage 5 is quieter than those. It gives you space.

The birds are part of it. So is the coticule, a stone unique in the world that you walk above without knowing it’s there until someone tells you. Then you think of barbers in nineteenth-century London and surgeons in Nairobi using something quarried by hand from this hillside, and the forest seems suddenly much older and more connected than it did a moment before.

And then there is Gouvy. A small town at a railway junction at the end of a long walk. A place that held out for four days with the wrong soldiers against the wrong odds and fed fifteen thousand men a day while doing it.

I hope you enjoyed travelling with me.

Denzil Walton

I created Discovering Belgium in 2011 to share the country’s hidden stories, fascinating places, and remarkable people. Through articles, photography, and audio walks, I share discoveries that reveal Belgium beyond the obvious. Hope you enjoy this site.