Qualla: Heerlen

Heerlen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sixty thousand people lost their jobs. That is the number that hangs over Heerlen like a slow-receding tide, the toll of the decade between 1965 and 1975 when one by one, the coal mines of the Eastern Mining District went dark. The Oranje Nassau shafts, Staatsmijn Emma, the chimneys named Lange Lies and Lange Jan that had loomed over the skyline like industrial saints, all of it gone within ten years. What Heerlen has been doing ever since is the harder work: figuring out what a city is for, once the reason it grew up has been taken away.

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Heerlen: Coriovallum at the Crossroads

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Long before coal, there was the road. The Romans built Coriovallum here as a military settlement at the intersection of two arteries of the empire: Boulogne-sur-Mer to Cologne running east-west, and Xanten through Aachen down to Trier running north-south. A traveller could stop, ...

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Heerlen: The Land van Herle

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Heerlen reappears in the historical record in 1065, listed in a document by Udo, bishop of Toul, as a possession in the bishopric of Liege. The counts of Are arrived, built a moated castle and the Schelmentoren prison tower and the Romanesque Saint Pancratius church whose 12th-ce...

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Heerlen: The Black Years

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Coal had been found at the Valkenburgerweg in 1874, but for a quarter-century almost nothing happened. Setting up a mine took capital and patience that private enterprise did not have. In 1901 the Dutch state intervened, bought up the unsold concessions, and chartered the Staatsm...

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Heerlen: From Black to Green

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Then it ended, almost as fast as it had begun. Cheaper coal from Poland and the United States, then the discovery of natural gas in Groningen in 1959, made the southern Limburg mines uneconomic. The last shaft closed in 1974. The Dutch government tried to soften the blow by reloc...

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Heerlen: The Glass Palace

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The hopeful object in this story is a department store. In 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, the textile merchant Peter Schunck commissioned the young Heerlen architect Frits Peutz to design a new store next to the medieval Pancratius church. What Peutz delivered was t...

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