Every design for Sittard

Evenings in Sittard begin at the café tables on the central market square, under the gables of a centre protected as a historic townscape. Around it stand old churches and monasteries, a few half-timbered houses, the Gothic St Peter's Church with its later steeple, and the Basilica of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, still a place of pilgrimage. Part of the medieval wall survives, and Het Nieuwe Domein has made a museum of a converted nineteenth-century school building.

Sittard lies in the narrow bottleneck of Limburg, where the Netherlands is less than ten kilometres wide: Germany's Selfkant borders it to the east, and to the west the Maas forms the border with Belgium. That position gave it a turbulent past – it belonged in turn to the Duchy of Jülich, to France and, briefly, to Belgium, and it spent months on the front line at the end of the Second World War – but also the easy, cross-border feel it has today. The coal mines once drove the region's economy; now industry and offices have taken their place.

On the south-eastern edge of the centre, the St Rosa chapel crowns the Kollenberg, small against the sky above the rooftops of the old town.