Rheine

Rheine seasons the Münsterland with salt and storks. On the town's green edge, the Bentlage estate gathers its treasures by the Ems: the late-Gothic Kloster Bentlage, a crosier monastery turned princely residence, keeps its cloister calm and two precious medieval reliquary gardens — rare devotional assemblages of relics amid silk flowers — while next door the Saline Gottesgabe, Westphalia's oldest saltworks, remembers centuries of brine boiling with its graduation wall still dripping salubriously in the Salinenpark: monastery, salt and spa park composing one of the region's gentlest cultural landscapes, connected to town by a riverside stroll.

The storks reside at the NaturZoo, Rheine's much-loved park where Germany's zoo storks first bred in a free-flying colony — dozens of nests clattering overhead each spring — alongside a monkey wood walked without fences. The town itself steps handsomely down to the Ems: the towering neo-Gothic and genuinely Gothic churches face each other across the water, the Falkenhof — the patrician court on the site of a Carolingian royal estate — houses the museum with its silver and Westphalian art, and the market square keeps busy Münsterland habits.

Textile mills once powered the town, their brick monuments now repurposed; today Rheine works diversely and cycles everywhere, the flat green land of hedgerows, moated houses and the nearby desert-like dunes of the Emsland inviting. Salt below, storks above, the Ems between: Rheine's blessings arrive by water and by wing.