Rheda-Wiedenbruck Audio Tours

Rheda and Wiedenbruck stood separately on the Ems River for nearly a millennium before being merged in 1970. They resisted the merger's logic for decades, and the resistance makes sense when you walk between them: the two old towns have genuinely different characters, separated by the highway that cuts between their centers and by the Ems itself. Wiedenbruck, documented as receiving market rights from Emperor Otto in 952, has a tight historic center with a half-timbered church and bullet damage still visible on the facade of Saint Aegidius from the Thirty Years' War. Schloss Rheda, the moated Renaissance castle, anchors the other town with a different kind of authority.

Rheda-Wiedenbruck's modern reputation has been shaped largely by the Tonnies meat processing plant, one of Europe's largest pork facilities, which operates on the town's edge and employs thousands of workers from across the continent.

In 2020, a large coronavirus outbreak at the plant made the city briefly famous in a way it would not have chosen. The surrounding Teutoburg Forest landscape makes for excellent walking, and the Ems valley between the two old centers has been developed as a green corridor that offers some respite from the agricultural and industrial scale of the surrounding region.