Board of the Borne twinning committee learned about the history and present of the Emsstadt during a city tour
Rheine. The annual planning meeting of the partner committee from Borne and the Rheine twinning association was dominated by the war in Ukraine.
Mayor Dr. Peter Lüttmann welcomed the board members of the two associations to the town hall and emphasized the importance of town twinning. Especially in these difficult times, he said, joint action was necessary. Among other things, he quoted the letter from Silvia Carreira from the twin town of Leiria. She had asked that Rheine provide accommodation and food for 60 refugees from Ukraine. These are this weekend by bus on the way from Warsaw to Leiria:
“I am so sorry to have to do this extra work for all of you here in Rheine, but in hard times we remember first the friends we know we can rely on. Thank you in advance for anything you can possibly do.”
Before the actual “working session” began, the guests from Borne first had a tour of the city. This task had been taken over by city guide André Schaper, who actually guides through the city as a “night watchman” for the tourist office. That he also knows his way around his hometown by day and knows a lot of current background information, he already showed at the first stop at the construction site of the town hall center.
In recent years, the Staelsche Hof has been one of the “dirty spots” in the city center. This is to change with the renovation of the city hall and the construction of the new city hotel. The fact that the originally capped costs for the town hall center of 65 million euros have risen to 75 million euros in the meantime surprised very few visitors. The Corona crisis and the war in Ukraine led to enormous cost increases. The overall project is scheduled for completion in 2025. How high the costs will ultimately be, André Schaper did not want to commit himself to. After all, he is a city guide and not a city clairvoyant.
The city guide created a link between the past and the present at the relief on the corner of Emsstrasse and Herrenschreiberstrasse. Here he used a red ribbon to illustrate the size of the city center in the Middle Ages. He reported on the development of the city, above all through the settlement of the textile industry, to its present size with around 80,000 inhabitants.
In bright sunshine but a sharp easterly wind, the tour continued to the new market square. Here, Schaper invited the guests from Borne to mingle with the many guests of the catering establishments once a summer.
Only a short time was for the history of the parish church of St. Dionysius. Here, on the square next to the church, the board members were able to see for themselves how a modern and pleasing backyard development of Marktstraße has emerged from a former dingy corner around the Kannegießerhaus.
Before they went for a short walk along the Ems, they naturally stopped at the Falkenhof, the nucleus of the city of Rheine. Here, the guests from Borne learned historical facts up to the conversion of the Falkenhof into a city museum within the framework of the Regionale 2004.