Bergheim

Bergheim administers the engine room of the Rhineland's energy. The district town on the Erft sits amid the great lignite theatre: to its west yawns the Hambach opencast mine, one of Europe's vastest excavations, its bucket-wheel excavators the size of cathedrals; on its own ground rise the cooling towers of Niederaußem, among Germany's mightiest power stations — a landscape of superlatives now in historic transition, as the coal era winds toward its legislated end and the pits prepare their second lives as lake country. The Terra Nova route and viewpoints let visitors watch geology being rearranged; Schloss Paffendorf, the Renaissance moated castle in its romantic park, serves — with fine irony — as the energy company's information centre, knights' island explaining kilowatts.

The old Bergheim persists at the centre: the Aachener Tor, the massive medieval gate, opens onto a long market street where the town's centuries as an Erft crossing and Jülich territory read in church and gables; the Erft itself, once a working river of mills, now idles greenly through parks.

Around the mines, the recultivated land surprises: forests planted a generation ago maturing into recreation country, villages relocated and remembered, cycling routes stitching the seams. A gate from the Middle Ages, a horizon of towers, a future of lakes: Bergheim is Germany's energy transition with a postal address.