"A Sole Experience in North Rhine... " a Bad Oeynhausen Travel Page by Weissdorn

(Pictures will follow)
At one point or another everyone who has worked at least 15 years in this country decides that it's time for a break, and has a little chat with their HMO, about a wellness cure. With the benefits of socialized medicine, you can assume that getting a cure approved won't be a problem, but it's like pot luck finding out where they will send you.
Oh, will I get to go to a spa on a little island in the North Sea, or maybe in the scenic setting of the Alps.

Uh-uh. They sent me to Bad Oeynhausen. Where? Had to get out the map to find this one, and ask someone how to pronounce the place: B-A-D O-I-R-N-H-O-W-Z-E-N.

Ah-ha. Well at least the town has the word "Bad" in front of it. That meant it was an official spa resort, and not a looney bin in the boonies. "Bad" is the German word for "bath", which in this case means "spa".

When Germans are ordered by their HMOs to go to the spa, the call it "Kur" or the "Cure"; an old expression that falls back on the days where bougoise English housewives were sent to places like Baden-Baden to drink hot thermal sping water to heal their menstruation or menopause sympthoms. Alone the water supposedly cured them miraculously, therefore the name, the Cure.

Now, before you cross it off your list of places to go, let me tell you about how you can pamper yourself for a week, in a geniune original continental cure, even if you don't belong to the German Socialised Medicine System.

Bad Oeynhausen is the only official spa town in this German State of North Rhine Westphalia. It was discovered by accident. One legend says that a farmer droves his pigs out into the forest in 1745, and when the pigs came back to the barn the were completely coated with salt.
Another stories says that Prussians, who ruled the area until the Bismarck era, were in the process running out of money for erecting saline extracting works, called gradier works, which is a rather expensive and time-consuming method for making salt. During this time, the Royal Prussian Mining Captian, Karl Free Lord von Oeynhausen (1795 - 1865) spent 15 years boring for rock salt, since hacking it out of the ground is much better that having a trickle-down system and scrapping it of tree branches. He never found rock salt. Instead he found one of the biggest saline thermal springs in Germany. That was in 1845. Word soon spread around about the thermal well, and people started whispering about the miraculous healing qualities of the salty water, and thus a spa town was born. At first they called the town "New Salt Works near Rehme". Later the German Kaiser decided to name it after his Mining Captain.

After the Kaiser officially dubbed the town with the title "Spa Resort", they went to work, and erected an elaborate classical building ensemble, designed by the Prussian Royal Architect,
Peter Joseph Lenné. In the 19th century dozens of impressive villas sprang up around the park, which is why Bad Oeynhause is known as a sort of architectual museum today.