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Heerlen occupies a curious position in the Dutch landscape, sitting in the far south of Limburg where the Netherlands tapers to a narrow strip between Belgium and Germany. It is not a city that announces itself with grand canals or a famous skyline, yet its story is one of the more dramatic in the country: a Roman settlement called Coriovallum that slumbered through the medieval centuries before being woken, violently and completely, by coal. The mines that opened across the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed Heerlen from a modest market town into an industrial centre of genuine European scale, drawing workers from across the continent and leaving behind an architectural legacy that still defines the place today.

That legacy is most visible in the Pancratiuskerk and the surrounding streets of the old centre, where the Roman thermal baths, the Thermae 2000 complex aside, left foundations that archaeologists have been piecing together for decades. The Coriovallum ruins, preserved beneath and around the modern city, give Heerlen a historical depth that surprises visitors who arrive expecting only post-industrial texture. The Roman mosaic floors and bath structures on display at the Thermenmuseum are among the best-preserved in the Low Countries, and they sit almost incongruously close to the Modernist civic architecture that the mining boom funded.