From charming little sleepy towns in the Eggegebirge or Rothaargebirge mountains to conurbations where you can only guess which city you are about to filter into; from historical half-timbered and red-brick buildings – in 1648 the Thirty Years War ended with the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in the Town Hall of Münster – to the stock exchange; from the research centre to Europe’s largest inland harbour in Duisburg; from one of the huge stadiums in which we indulge our football mania at weekends to the narrow lanes of the wine villages on the Rhine – this is how your trips through North Rhine-Westphalia, in short NRW, might look.

A British military government decree dated August 23, 1946 brought about the union of the northern part of the once Prussian Rhine province and the equally Prussian province of Westphalia, to which the little state of Lippe-Detmold was added six months later. A postwar inauguration, today it is the most densely populated state in the Federal Republic of Germany, with almost 18 million inhabitants.

One federal state, three state sections, but numerous landscapes and regions – the Lower Rhine, the Münster and Tecklenburg regions, the Ruhr District, Sauerland, Siegerland and the Bergisches Land, plus the areas around Cologne, Bonn and Aachen, the city of Charlemagne.