Curated Itinerary
Erzgebirge / Krušnohoří: the Ore Mountains Mining Route
Across the Ore Mountains in seven stops: Freiberg’s silver capital, Annaberg’s Gothic churches, Seiffen’s toy villages and Bohemia’s Jáchymov, where the dollar got its name.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Freiberg to Krupka, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
This itinerary crosses the Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří Mining Region, inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 as a single landscape on both sides of the German–Czech ridge. Seven stops follow the ore through eight centuries: Freiberg’s silver and its mining academy, the boom-town churches of Annaberg, the water-powered Frohnauer Hammer, Marienberg’s Renaissance grid, Seiffen’s wooden-toy afterlife, Jáchymov’s silver-to-uranium arc, and the medieval tin terraces of Krupka.
The order is the ore’s own chronology — discovery, boom, refinement, decline and consequence — and it happens to make a clean west-to-east drive along the ridge. The border is crossed once and barely noticed; the listing exists precisely because the mountain never observed it.
Three days by car cover the route from Dresden or Prague. Book at least one underground tour, and if you can choose the season, choose Advent: the region’s Christmas traditions are mining festivals that never stopped.
Read the full story of this route in the CHO Magazine →
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Guides, associations and cultural operators build their own routes here: pick the stops from the archive, add your notes, and the map, the GPX and the printable version come out on their own. Your programme gets a permanent page, your events go on the city pages people read while planning — and if you sell your route as a road-book or a virtual tour, you receive 80% of the price net of tax.
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A word from your host
Go underground at least once — the region only makes sense from below. And if you have any freedom in the calendar, come in Advent: the candle arches in the windows are mine entrances, and the whole ridge remembers where its winters came from.
Getting around
A car and three days cover the ridge from Dresden or Prague; the border crossing is unmarked. Show mines run guided tours most of the year — carry a layer, it is eight degrees down there in any season.
Step by step
Freiberg
A former silver-mining powerhouse in Saxony, Freiberg preserves eight centuries of mining heritage and hosts the world's oldest mining university, now…
St. Anne’s Church, Annaberg-Buchholz
A monumental hall church in Saxony blending Late Gothic and Renaissance styles. Originally built as a Catholic church in 1499, it became Lutheran in 1539.
Frohnauer Hammer
A working hammer mill in Saxony's Ore Mountains, designated as Germany's first technical monument in 1907, preserving centuries of metalworking tradition.
Marienberg
A historic town in Saxony's Ore Mountains, Marienberg served as a district capital until administrative reorganization in 2008, with a 2020 population…
Seiffen
A Saxon town in the Ore Mountains where miners turned woodcarvers, now famous for handmade nutcrackers, Christmas pyramids and traditional wooden toys.
Jáchymov
A Czech spa town where silver mining created the Thaler and dollar, and radium was first discovered—now a UNESCO World Heritage mining landscape.
Krupka
A tin-mining town in the Czech Ore Mountains whose well-preserved medieval centre and basilica reflect centuries of industrial heritage and careful…
Download for tour navigation
🔒 The walk and the notes are open to everyone on this page. The files to take with you — the stop list as a PDF, and the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — come with a CHO account, and the free one includes them.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.