Aachen (, also known as Bad Aachen ) is a spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Geographically, Aachen is the westernmost city of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, west of Cologne.

RWTH Aachen University, one of Germany's Universities of Excellence, is located in the city.

There is some documentary proof that the Romans named the hot sulfur springs of Aachen Aquis-Granum, and indeed to this day the city is known in Italian as Aquisgrana, in Spanish as Aquisgrán and in Polish as Akwizgran.

He went on to remain there in a mansion which he may have extended, although there is no source attesting to any significant building activity at Aachen in his time, apart from the building of the Palatine Chapel in Aachen ( since 1929, cathedral ) and the palatial presentation halls.

Traces of this hidden agenda of the city's history is found in the 18th century guidebooks to Aachen as well as to the other spas ; the main indication for visiting patients, ironically, was syphilis ; only by the end of the 19th century had rheuma become the most important object of cures at Aachen and Burtscheid.

The Grashaus, a late medieval house at the Markt, is one of the oldest non-religious buildings in downtown Aachen.

The Elisenbrunnen is one of the most famous sights of Aachen.

Aachen has a large number of spin-offs from the university's IT-technology department and is a major centre of IT development in Germany.

The airport that serves Aachen, Maastricht Aachen Airport, is located about 40 km away in Dutch territory, close to the town of Beek.

Aachen is connected to the Autobahn A4 ( West-East ), A44 ( North-South ) and A544 ( a smaller motorway from the A4 to the Europaplatz near the city centre ).

Due to the enormous amount of traffic at the Aachen road interchange, there is often serious traffic accumulation, which is why there are plans to expand the interchange in the coming years.

Aachen is also famous for its carnival ( Karneval, Fasching ), in which families dress in colorful costumes.

The local specialty of Aachen is an originally stonehard type of sweet bread, baked in large flat loaves, called Aachener Printen.

RWTH Aachen University, established as Polytechnicum in 1870, is one of the Germany's Universities of Excellence with strong emphasis on technological research, especially for electrical and mechanical engineering, computer sciences, physics, and chemistry.

The university clinics attached to the RWTH, the Klinikum Aachen, is the biggest single-building hospital in Europe.

The German Army's Technical School ( Technische Schule des Heeres und Fachschule des Heeres für Technik ) is in Aachen.

Aachen is twinned with:

He was of noble Frankish parentage, and educated at the palace school in Aquae Grani ( Aachen ) under Alcuin.

Since Roman times, the hot springs at Aachen have been channelled into baths.

In the year of his coronation as King of Franks, 768, Charlemagne came to spend Christmas at Aachen for the first time.

ICE high speed trains from Brussels via Cologne to Frankfurt am Main and Thalys trains from Paris to Cologne also stop at Aachen Central Station.

Only slower trains stop at these, but Aachen-West has developed enormous importance due to the expanding RWTH Aachen university.

* Aachen Zoo at Zoo-Infos. de

In July 1520 Dürer made his fourth and last major journey, to renew the Imperial pension Maximilian had given him and to secure the patronage of the new emperor, Charles V, who was to be crowned at Aachen.

In 936 King Henry I of Germany died and his eldest son, Eadgyth's husband, was crowned at Aachen as King Otto I.

Ulrich Schmidt at RWTH Aachen examined Appel and Haken's proof for his master's thesis.

In 936, Otto I the Great was crowned as king at Aachen ; his coronation as emperor by the Pope at Rome in 962 inaugurated what became later known as the Holy Roman Empire, which became to be identified with Germany.

Louis II de Bourbon had captured Franche-Comté, but in face of an indefensible position, Louis XIV agreed to a peace at Aachen.

However, the decapitation cloth of St. John is kept at the Aachen Cathedral.

Seeking help from a physicist, on March 14, 1888, he wrote to Otto Lehmann, at that time a < i lang =" de "> Privatdozent </ i > in Aachen.

Student programmers at the Technische Hochschule in Aachen, Germany in 1970

At the same time, Charlemagne was consciously reviving the Roman expression in his " palace " at Aachen, of which only his chapel remains.

The plan was an ideal of what a well-designed and well-supplied monastery should have, as envisioned by one of the synods held at Aachen for the reform of monasticism in the Frankish empire during the early years of emperor Louis the Pious ( between 814 and 817 ).

As a successful diplomat between 1802 and 1819, Humboldt was plenipotentiary Prussian minister at Rome from 1802, ambassador at Vienna from 1812 during the closing struggles of the Napoleonic Wars, at the congress of Prague ( 1813 ) where he was instrumental in drawing Austria to ally with Prussia and Russia against France, a signer of the peace treaty at Paris and the treaty between Prussia and defeated Saxony ( 1815 ), at Frankfurt settling post-Napoleonic Germany, and at the congress at Aachen in 1818.

As Aachen was in the kingdom of his brother, it was necessary for Charles to build a new palace for his court in his own power base of western Alemannia.

The sponsors of the prize, the City of Aachen, refer to Charlemagne as the " Founder of Western Culture ", and assert that under his reign, the City of Aachen was once the spiritual and political centre of the whole of what is now western Europe.

Monschau () is a small resort town in the Eifel region of western Germany, located in the district Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Alemannia Aachen is a German football club from the western city of Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia.

At the opposite end, the authority of Cologne, Aachen, Worms, Goslar, Wetzlar, Augsburg and Regensburg barely extended beyond the city walls.

" The entries in 811 end by mentioning the death of Charles the Younger ( 4 December 811 ) and Charlemagne wintering in Aachen.

Following the end of fighting in Aachen, the Western Allies ' First Army was tasked with the capture of a series of dams behind the Hürtgen Forest, which could be used by the Germans to flood the valleys which opened the road to Berlin.

They were based in Aachen near Liege, at the opposite end of Wallonia.

At the end of November, the Division straddled the Dutch-German border with one combat command in Germany ( in the area of Ubach, north of Aachen ) and two in the Netherlands.

At the end of 1984 the first martial arts school was officially opened in Aachen, west of Cologne, the largest city in NRW, and trained the two combat arts Wing Tsun and Escrima.

Towards the end of the year 1755 in the area around Düren and Aachen began a series of earthquakes, which reached its peak on February 18, 1756 with an earthquake with the strength 8 on the Mercalli scale.

The pros and cons of the boycott were further discussed in several interventions at the 1980 Bilderberg meeting held towards the end of April in Aachen.

On 19 May 2008, he signed a contract extension with Aachen until the end of the 2009-10 season.

Towards the end of 1847 he suffered health problems and went to Recoaro spa in northern Italy, then Grafenberg and finally Aachen before resigning from the Austrian army in June 1848 after charges against him relating to debts and absence without leave were dropped.

At the other end of Corridor F the section from Aachen to Oberhausen will be ready in 2012 while the missing section from Oberhausen to Hanover will be ready until 2020.

At the other end of the table, 1860 Munich and Alemannia Aachen were demoted.