Vallendar

Vallendar trains chief executives and receives pilgrims from every continent. The small Rhine town by Koblenz holds two institutions of improbable international reach. The WHU — Otto Beisheim School of Management — is Germany's most renowned private business school: from a compact riverside campus it sends graduates into the world's boardrooms and founders' garages, its rankings and alumni network giving the town a permanent cosmopolitan undercurrent of students and conferences.

Above the town, in the Schoenstatt valley, stands the original shrine of the Schoenstatt Movement: founded here in 1914 around a modest chapel, the Marian apostolic movement grew worldwide — daughter shrines replicate the "Urheiligtum" on every inhabited continent, and pilgrim groups from Latin America, Africa and Asia arrive year-round at the source, making the quiet side valley one of German Catholicism's most international addresses, with its churches, houses and jubilee gatherings.

The town between campus and shrine keeps Rhenish comforts: the old centre's lanes and the Marienburg, a riverside promenade facing the island of Niederwerth in the stream, wine terraces on the slopes, and Koblenz's Deutsches Eck and Ehrenbreitstein fortress a few minutes downstream. The Rheinsteig trail climbs through en route. Balance sheets by the river, a chapel for the world, the Rhine as common denominator: Vallendar's exports are leadership and devotion.