Banská Štiavnica and Slovakia's mining towns

Most towns are built on a hill or beside a river. Banská Štiavnica is built on silver. Its streets climb up and down the steep sides of a narrow valley in the mountains of central Slovakia, and its houses, churches and castles are stacked on the slopes as if somebody had poured them in from above. It is a remarkable small town, and still, surprisingly, not very well known.

The silver town

For centuries Banská Štiavnica was a mining town above all else, and silver was the metal that mattered most. At its peak, in the sixteenth century, the ore region around it produced silver on a vast scale, more than three hundred tonnes of it by one estimate, and the town was known simply as the silver town. The money paid for the town you see today, its houses, churches and castles.

With mining came learning. A mining school was set up in the town in 1735, and in 1762 the Empress Maria Theresa founded a Mining Academy here, which is often described as the first technical university of its kind in the world.

In 1993 UNESCO inscribed the historic town of Banská Štiavnica and the technical monuments in its vicinity as a World Heritage Site. It was one of three Slovak places inscribed that year. Another was the Castle of Spiš, and the third was Vlkolínec, of which more below. All three happen to lie on the same tour in the catalogue, which makes it a rare chance to see a whole year's worth of a country's World Heritage in one journey.

The lakes in the hills

The most surprising of those technical monuments are the lakes. The hills around Banská Štiavnica are full of small, still lakes in the woods, and none of them are natural. They are tajchy, reservoirs built by the miners, most of them in the eighteenth century, to collect rainwater and drive the pumps and machinery that kept the deep mines working. The region had no large rivers, so the miners made their own water supply. At its height the system had some sixty reservoirs, connected by more than a hundred kilometres of channels and tunnels. The first of them were made by local miners as early as the fifteenth century, and the system grew as the mines went deeper and the need to pump them out grew with them. It is one of those places where you can see, in the shape of the land itself, how much effort went into getting metal out of the ground.

The mines are closed now, and the reservoirs have a gentler use. They make the countryside round the town an unusual kind of lake district, one that was engineered by hand for industry and has since gone quietly back to nature.

The Calvary and Vlkolínec

On a hill above the town stands the Calvary, a pilgrimage hill of chapels and churches, which is also part of the World Heritage inscription. It is a steep walk, and the view of the town below, red roofs in a green bowl, is the reward.

Another of the places UNESCO listed in Slovakia in 1993 lies further north, in the hills of the Žilina region. Vlkolínec is a small village of traditional wooden houses, kept much as it was, and it is a very different face of rural Slovakia from the mining towns.

A tour that reaches Banská Štiavnica

Explore Worldwide's fourteen-night Highlights of Eastern Europe is the holiday in the catalogue that goes to Banská Štiavnica. Its places include Krakow, the Pieniny National Park, Spis Castle and Tatranska Lomnica, then Banska Bystrica, Vlkolinec, Banska Stiavnica and Stará Hora, and Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna and Mikulov. It has departures in every month from May to October.

Explore Worldwide's seven-night Krakow to Budapest Adventure crosses Slovakia too, but further east. Its places include Krakow, Lesnica, Spisske, Tatranska Lomnica, Starý Smokovec and Hrebienok, Kosice, Tokaj, Tard and Budapest. It does not reach Banská Štiavnica. It has departures in every month from May to October.

If you go, give Banská Štiavnica more time than you think it needs. Climb to the Calvary, walk out to one of the tajchy, and come back down through the streets in the evening light.