Керкраде

Kerkrade is the Netherlands' city of wind and coal. The oldest mining town in the country — the monks of Rolduc Abbey were digging coal here centuries before the industrial age — it rose and laboured with the pits until they closed in the early 1970s, leaving the statue of d'r Joep, the miner, standing on the Markt as the community's patron saint. Rolduc itself, founded in 1104, survives as the largest and best-preserved abbey complex in the Netherlands, on the official list of the country's hundred greatest heritage sites.

From the miners' bands grew the town's second identity: since 1951 Kerkrade has held the World Music Contest, the four-yearly "Olympics of wind music", which fills the Rodahal and the stadium with tens of thousands of musicians from every continent — the undisputed world capital of the brass and wind repertoire. The town's other curiosity is geopolitical: the Nieuwstraat runs along the German border, one side of the street Dutch, the other the German town of Herzogenrath, the two now formally cooperating as "Eurode". The archive belongs to Kerkrade's open-air tradition: staged "Carmen" in 2002 and "Aida" in 2008 on the Marktplatz itself — opera in the square where the miners' processions once passed, in a town that has always preferred its music outdoors and fortissimo.