Travel ­planning

The relics of St Liborius of Le Mans arrived in the episcopal city of Paderborn that year. This marked the beginning of the tradition of the Libori festival, which attracts around 1.7 million visitors to the Paderborn every year towards the end of July - some because of the solemn procession, some because of the huge public festival. And almost all of them because of the special mixture of both.

Minden was one of the first member towns of the medieval trading network. Nieheim, Paderborn, Bielefeld, Herford, Lemgo, Brakel, Wiedenbrück, Warburg and Höxter were also part of the network and attracted travelling merchants from all over the world.

Although Bad Holzhausen only became a spa in the modern sense in 2007, the tradition of the farm spa goes back much further and begins with the discovery of the healing spring in 1713. Health tourism began with the construction of the first bathhouse in 1829.

Prussian King Frederick William IV named Oeynhausen the "Royal Spa of Oeynhausen" - making the town a meeting place for the upper ten thousand. The sophisticated spa architecture and numerous villas from the 19th and early 20th centuries still bear witness to this today.

The huge bridge over the Beketal valley is one of the oldest and most impressive railway structures in Germany. With its ceremonial inauguration in 1853, the railway line from Hamm to Warburg was completed almost at the same time as the Cologne-Minden railway - since then, East Westphalia-Lippe - the Teutoburg Forest holiday region - has been easily accessible by train.

The Weser breakthrough through the Wiehengebirge mountains is an impressive landmark in its own right. Thanks to the emperor's statue high above Porta Westfalica, the region experienced a real tourist boom. Visitors came mainly on the Cologne-Minden railway, which now stopped here seven times a day. The "Nottmeyer" hotel on the road to Minden, the "Zum Großen Kurfürsten" hotel on the right bank of the Weser, the "Hotel Bellevue" on the foothills of the Jakobsberg and the fine "Hotel Kaiserhof", whose hall building could accommodate 2,000 guests, all opened in quick succession.

The Eggegebirgsverein was founded in Altenbeken on 11 March 1900 to ‘promote and facilitate tourism in the Eggegebirge region, in particular by creating signposts, benches, footpaths, viewpoints, refuges and springs’, according to its declared aims.

50,000 guests came to Paderborn for the annual meeting of hikers. The event, which this time was organised under the motto "Hiking at springs", was hosted by the Eggegebirgsverein, which had already proved its worth as host for the German Hiking Association in 1981 and 1998.

The region's affinity for hiking was demonstrated in 2018 in Lippe/Detmold, where the German Hiking Day was once again held.