Buren

Büren lies on the Paderborn Plateau, where the Afte flows into the Alme. Around 1150 the lords of Büren built a castle at the confluence, and in 1195 the Bishop of Paderborn agreed to the founding of a town beneath it: he shared the cost of the walls and granted rights of coinage and toll, and in return the lords held the town of him as a fief. Downstream on the Alme stands the Wewelsburg, rebuilt between 1603 and 1609 for the prince-bishops on a rare triangular plan.

The family died out in 1661 with Moritz von Büren, who left his lordship to the Jesuits. The old castles were pulled down between 1717 and 1728, and in the same years the Jesuits raised a broad Baroque college in the town. Their property passed to the Prussian state in 1802–03.