Every design for Rheine

Rheine began at a ford. Where the Ems crosses a low ridge of limestone, the riverbed is shallow and rocky, and two old merchant roads met there long before the place appeared in a document signed by Louis the Pious. Frankish soldiers guarded the crossing, a church followed, and the town grew around the water.

It sits on the northern edge of Westphalia, where the Münsterland gives way to the Emsland and the border with Lower Saxony is only a few minutes away. The river divides the town from south to north, the Stadtberg and the Thieberg rise on either bank, and the Waldhügel to the south is the highest point in town. The town survived being burned almost to the ground near the end of the Thirty Years' War, the boom and decline of its textile mills, and the great Ems flood after the Second World War.

The Gradierwerk, where salt water trickles down walls of brushwood, has become the place people show visitors first, and walking past it on a breezy day is as close to home as Rheine gets.