Rhineland
The Rhineland German: Rheinland; French: Rhénanie; Dutch: Rijnland; Kölsch: Rhingland; Latinised name: Rhenania is the fall out to used for a broadly defined area of Western Germany along a Rhine, chiefly its middle section.
Geography
To a west the area stretches to the borders with Luxembourg, Belgium & the Netherlands; on the eastern side it encompasses the towns as well as cities along the river and the Bergisches Land area up to the Westphalian Siegerland and Hessian regions. Stretching down to the North Palatine Uplands in the south, this area, apart from for the Saarland, more or less corresponds with the modern ownership of the term.
The southern and eastern parts are mainly hill country Westerwald, Hunsrück, Siebengebirge, Taunus and Eifel, outline by river valleys, principally the Middle Rhine up to Bingen or very rarely between the confluence with the Neckar and Cologne and its Ahr, Moselle and Nahe tributaries. The border of the North German plain is marked by the lower Ruhr. In the south, the river cuts the Rhenish Massif.
The area encompasses the western component of the Ruhr industrial region and the Cologne Lowland. Some of the larger cities in the Rhineland are Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Koblenz, Krefeld, Leverkusen, Mainz, Mönchengladbach, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Oberhausen, Remscheid, Solingen, Trier and Wuppertal.
Toponyms as living as local family names often trace back to the Frankish heritage. The lands on the western shore of the Rhine are strongly characterized by Roman influence, including viticulture. In the core territories, large parts of the population are members of the Catholic Church.