Meschede

Meschede pairs one of Germany's oldest women's foundations with one of its youngest abbeys. The town's origins lie in the ninth-century stift of St Walburga — a community of noblewomen among Westphalia's earliest, whose church still holds the relics and the town's deepest memory — while on the hill above, the Benedictines of Königsmünster, founded only in 1928, built a modern abbey whose bold concrete church and workshops made it a centre of contemporary monastic culture: guesthouse, school, forge and publishing keep the rule of Benedict in productive dialogue with the present, and the abbey's concerts and courses draw guests from far beyond the Sauerland.

Between the two spiritual poles, Meschede works as the Hochsauerland district's capital: administration, a university of applied sciences campus giving the town a technical pulse, and mid-size industry in the Ruhr and Henne valleys. The Henne itself delivers the recreation: dammed above town into the Hennesee, whose wooded shores, marina and lakeside promenade — connected to the centre by a landmark footbridge — serve as the municipal riviera, with the Sauerland's ridges rising behind toward winter sports and the Rothaarsteig.

War damage and rebuilding left the centre practical; the treasures are deliberate ones — a Carolingian-rooted crypt, a modernist cloister, a lake made from a river. Nuns of the ninth century, monks of the twentieth, sailors of the weekend: Meschede's congregations succeed each other peaceably.