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Essen is the central city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany, and with 573,618 people it is the second largest city of the Ruhr after Dortmund. The Emscher flows through its north and the Ruhr through its south, where the river is dammed to form Lake Baldeney and Lake Kettwig.
The city grew around Essen Abbey, founded around 845, and stayed small until industrialisation, when the Krupp works, begun in 1811 as Germany's first cast-steel factory, made it a centre of coal and steel. In 2010 it was European Capital of Culture for the Ruhr, and in 2017 European Green Capital.
Visitors head first to the Zollverein World Heritage Site and the Ruhr Museum, then to the minster and the Old Synagogue in the city centre, the Museum Folkwang and the Aalto Theatre. In the green south lie Villa Hügel, the old towns of Werden and Kettwig and the Baldeneysee.
The Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex is the city's most famous landmark, a mine closed in 1986 and a coking plant closed in 1993 that were among Europe's largest. Its Bauhaus-style Shaft XII and winding tower became a symbol of the Ruhr and a World Heritage Site in 2001.
The Ruhr Museum presents the nature, culture and history of the Ruhr area and is housed in the former coal washing plant of the Zollverein colliery. Visitors ride the largest escalator in Germany up to the 24-metre level and then go down through floors on the region's past.
Villa Hügel is the 269-room mansion that the industrialist Alfred Krupp built from 1870 to 1873 on a hill in Bredeney, in a park of 28 hectares. It was the Krupp family home until after the Second World War, covers 8,100 square metres, and now hosts a foundation, art shows and concerts.
Margarethenhöhe is a garden city founded by Margarethe Krupp in 1906, with 3,092 homes in 935 buildings on 115 hectares, 50 of them woodland, and it is considered the first of its kind in Germany. All its houses follow one style with small variations, and the Margarethe Krupp Foundation runs it.
Essen Minster, the cathedral of the Diocese of Essen since 1958, grew from the church of Essen Abbey, founded around 845. The Gothic hall church of light sandstone was built after 1275 and keeps an Ottonian westwork and crypt, and its treasury holds the Golden Madonna.
The Alte Synagoge Essen, consecrated in 1913 in Byzantine Revival and Art Nouveau style, is one of the largest testimonies to Jewish culture in pre-war Germany. Burned inside on Kristallnacht in 1938, it was restored to its original design in the 1980s and is now a house of Jewish culture.
Werden Abbey was founded by Saint Ludger around 799, 45 years before Essen Abbey, in Werden, a town that became part of Essen in 1929. Its old church, St. Ludgerus, was made a minor basilica in 1993, and the main abbey building is now the headquarters of the Folkwang University of the Arts.
The Aalto Theatre is the opera and ballet house designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, who won its competition in 1959. Building began only in 1983, after his death, and it opened on 25 September 1988 with Die Meistersinger; its asymmetric hall has seats of deep indigo blue.
Museum Folkwang is a collection of 19th and 20th century art formed in 1922 from the city art museum and Karl Ernst Osthaus's Folkwang Museum in Hagen. It holds the German Poster Museum and a Chipperfield extension of 2010, and in 1932 Paul J. Sachs called it the most beautiful museum in the world.
The Grugapark covers about 65 hectares in Rüttenscheid, beside the Grugahalle and the Messe Essen exhibition centre. It opened in 1929 for the first Great Ruhrland Horticultural Exhibition, laid out with the help of about a thousand jobless workers, and it now includes the botanical garden.
The Baldeneysee is the largest of the six reservoirs on the River Ruhr, in the south of Essen, dredged from 1931 to 1933 by thousands of unemployed coal miners using simple tools. Today it is used for sailing, rowing and boat tours, and the wooded hills around the lake are popular with hikers.
Kettwig is the southernmost and largest borough of Essen, a former textile town that joined the city only in 1975 and has largely kept its old character. Like Werden it escaped the worst of the war damage that hit the northern districts, and its hills along the Ruhr are largely green.
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