Every design for Bad Oeynhausen

Bad Oeynhausen is known as a spa town. Thermal salt water was struck here in 1845 by men drilling for salt, the first baths followed quickly, and in 1848 the King of Prussia named the place Bad Oeynhausen. The town has lived around its springs ever since; today specialist clinics, above all the heart and diabetes centre of North Rhine-Westphalia, shape daily life as much as the old spa culture does.

The Deutsche Märchen- und Wesersagenmuseum is a fitting address in a town that begins with a legend of its own, and the Museumshof and the Großsteingrab von Werste reach much further back into the Werre valley's past. Most days, though, life plays out in the Kurpark, laid out to plans by Peter Joseph Lenné, and among the villas around it, a mix of styles so rich that the town has been called a museum of nineteenth-century architecture. The former Kurhaus, now the Kaiserpalais, hosts a variety theatre, a restaurant and a disco.

And in the centre stands the Sültemeyer Fountain, which everyone calls the pig fountain, for the farmer whose pigs came home from the mud with salt crusted on their backs.