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 at the western end of the Benrath line that divides High German to the south from the rest of the West Germanic speech area to the north.

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.

This permission opening the door to luxurious living, the council of Aachen, AD 817, decreed that the abbot should dine in the refectory, and be content with the ordinary fare of the monks, unless he had to entertain a guest.

The city and its fortified sourroundings were encircled 13 September – 16 October 1944 by the US 1st Infantry Division and 3rd Armored Division in conjunction with the US 2nd Armored Division and 30th Infantry Division during the prolonged Battle of Aachen, later reinforced by US 28th Infantry Division elements.

Four RE lines and two RB lines connect Aachen with the Ruhrgebiet, Mönchengladbach, Liège, Düsseldorf and the Siegerland.

The International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen was awarded in the year 2000 to the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, for his special personal contribution to cooperation with the states of Europe, for the preservation of peace, freedom, democracy and human rights in Europe, and for his support of the enlargement of the European Union.

Aachen has the hottest springs of Central Europe with water temperatures of 74 ° C ( 165 ° F ).

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.

Hurrying to Aachen, he crowned himself and was proclaimed by the nobles with shouts of Vivat Imperator Ludovicus.

The birth of this son damaged the Partition of Aachen, as Louis's attempts to provide for his fourth son met with stiff resistance from his older sons, and the last two decades of his reign were marked by civil war.

In the early Middle Ages Maastricht was, along with Aachen and the area around Liège, part of the heartland of the Carolingian Empire.

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.

* April 24 – War of the Austrian Succession: A congress assembles at Aix-la-Chapelle ( Aachen ) with the intent to conclude the war.

After the Congress of Vienna, Prussia was awarded with the entire Rhineland, which included the Grand Duchy of Berg, the ecclesiastic electorates of Trier and Cologne, the free cities of Aachen and Cologne, and nearly a hundred small lordships and abbeys.

The U. S. commanders ' initial goal was to pin down German forces in the area to keep them from reinforcing the front lines further north in the Battle of Aachen, where the Allies were fighting a trench war between a network of fortified towns and villages connected with field fortifications, tank traps and minefields.

At MIT, The University of Southern California, RWTH Aachen University, and the University of New South Wales, an " artificial retina " is under development: an implant which will bypass the photoreceptors of the retina and stimulate the attached nerve cells directly, with signals from a digital camera.

To the south, the U. S. 12th Army Group under Lieutenant General Omar Bradley was nearing the German border and had been ordered to orient on the Aachen gap with Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges ' U. S. First Army, in support of Montgomery's advance on the Ruhr.

In the late 1970s, this style was replaced with more surreal works such as Pow Wow ( 1979, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen ).

It is, however, now assumed by Johannes Fried, that the ' Vita ' was not written by Canaparius, but was written down in Liège, with the oldest traceable version having been at the imperial Adalbert shrine at Aachen.

When the Duke and Duchess appeared there, both wore magnificent crowns: Margaret's crown ( made in about 1461 ) was adorned with pearls, and with enamelled white roses for the House of York set between red, green and white enamelled letters of her name, with gold Cs and Ms, entwined with lovers ' knots ( it can still be seen in the treasury at Aachen Cathedral ).

He has been confused with his twin brother Alfonso ( a courtier of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who attended Charles's coronation in Aachen in 1520 and was Latin secretary of state from 1524 ).

Azincourt is twinned with the English village of Middleham in North Yorkshire.

It is possible to synthesize twinned amethyst, but this type is not available in large quantities in the market.

* the White Elephant-Afyon is twinned with the town of Hamm in Germany, and now has a large statue of Hamm's symbolic white elephant.

It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies.

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