Raalte sits at the geographic and emotional center of Salland, the agricultural belt that fills the western half of the Dutch province of Overijssel. Twenty thousand people live in the main town, most of them Roman Catholic in a country where Catholicism clusters in the south and east. The municipality functions as a regional market, a place where the smaller villages around it come for shopping and schools and the train. Trade and cattle breeding still matter to the local economy, alongside small industrial enterprises that mostly process what the surrounding farms produce. Tourism comes too, drawn by the festivals and the gentle Sallandse Heuvelrug ridge that rises a few kilometers east.

The name Stoppelhaene refers to the stubble left in the fields after the grain is cut, and the festival has anchored Raalte's late summer for over seventy years. It runs Wednesday through Sunday in the final week of August, with the Harvest Parade as its centerpiece on Thursday. The seed mosaics in the Heilige Kruisverheffing basilica are the festival's quiet signature: instead of paint or stained glass, religious imagery rendered in lentils, wheat berries, and poppy seeds. The church itself, designed by the Neo-Gothic architect Alfred Tepe and finished in 1892, is the largest building in town. When the parade ends and the special Masses are sung, Raalte folds back into its weekday routines, but the calendar has been marked again.

Since 1997, Raalte has hosted a second annual festival that has nothing to do with grain. Ribs and Blues, held on the Whitsun weekend, has pulled in names that punch well above what a 20,000-person town might expect: the Beach Boys, Status Quo, the Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer. Outside the festivals, the town keeps a smaller and older landmark. The Plaskerk, a modest Protestant church and the oldest building in central Raalte, was restored in 2006. While the work was underway, the Protestant congregation held its Sunday services inside the much larger Catholic basilica across the way. In a country famous for confessional fences, the gesture is a small and very Dutch piece of practical ecumenism.

The municipality stretches well beyond the town. Luttenberg, to the southeast, is known for its summer motorcycle races and for a Lourdes Cave, an artificial grotto with a statue of the Virgin opposite the village church. A small wooded hill of the same name offers heath walks. Just past the railway in nearby Heino, the Nijenhuis castle houses an important art museum with works by Constant Permeke and Van Gogh, ringed by a sculpture garden featuring Ossip Zadkine. The town has produced a few notable names of its own, including the speed skater Jan Smeekens, who took silver in the 500 meters at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The painter Petronella van Woensel was born here in 1785.