Slovak Mining Museum
Multi-site mining museum in a UNESCO-listed silver town, with castles and an underground open-air site.
The Slovak Mining Museum traces its origins to 1900, when a mining museum was founded in Banská Štiavnica, long the leading silver and gold town of the Kingdom of Hungary. It is not a single building but a group of sites spread across the town and its surroundings, among them the Old Castle, the New Castle, the Kammerhof, the Jozef Kollár Gallery and the Glanzenberg adit. The historic town and its technical monuments were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1993.
The best known part is the Open-Air Mining Museum, opened in 1974 around the Bartolomej shaft about a kilometre from the centre. Visitors put on a helmet and cape and follow a guide through several hundred metres of preserved workings, seeing hand-cut and machine-cut galleries and historic haulage equipment. Above ground the site displays headframes and mining machinery. The Kammerhof, once the seat of the chief mining office, houses the exhibition on the history of mining in Slovakia.
Highlights
- Guided underground tour at the Open-Air Mining Museum
- Old Castle with its clock tower and fortified courtyard
- Kammerhof exhibition on Slovak mining history
- Jozef Kollár Gallery in two Renaissance burgher houses
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