Kloster Bethlehem

The Franciscan Recollect monastery of Bethlehem once stood in the Ville forest, 1.5 kilometres south-west of Oberaußem near Bergheim. Founded in 1648 and consecrated seven years later, it served pilgrims drawn to a miraculous host kept in a wooden chapel built around 1500. By 1664 sixteen friars cared for up to twenty thousand visitors each year, making it one of the Rhineland’s busiest shrines.

The monastery’s church was enlarged in 1720, and the surrounding walls survived until the site was levelled in the 1960s. A carved epitaph for Count Erich-Adolph of Salm-Reifferscheidt, who died in 1673, still rests in the church at Jüchen. After the friars left in 1806, the buildings became a farm before the Elisabeth sisters opened a new convent on the same ground in 1899.

Today the area is part of an open landscape where only the old boundary wall remains. Visitors walk through quiet woodland where the first wooden cross was raised five centuries ago. The paths follow the route of the old Frankfurt–Cologne–Aachen road, once crowded with pilgrims seeking cures during outbreaks of plague.