Explore Banska Stiavnica

About Banska Stiavnica

Banská Štiavnica is one of the most beautiful and unusual small towns in Central Europe — a UNESCO World Heritage Site that climbs steeply up the side of a volcanic caldera in central Slovakia, with brightly painted baroque townhouses, three churches set at different vertical levels, and a working pre-industrial water-management system of 24 lakes (the famous tajchy) carved into the mountainside in the 16th-18th centuries to drive the medieval mining engines. The town was, between the 12th and 18th centuries, one of the most important silver-and-gold mining centres in Europe, with a population once larger than Vienna's. Now it has the wonderfully atmospheric Old Castle (Starý zámok) and New Castle (Nový zámok — a Renaissance watchtower built to warn of Ottoman raids), the brilliant baroque Holy Trinity Square with its plague column, and the fascinating Slovak Mining Museum which includes the Bartolomej shaft — an actual working mine 65m below ground where you walk through galleries first cut in the 14th century. Don't miss a hike around several of the tajch lakes (Klinger and Velná are the nearest), a tasting at the local Buchwald confectionery (the famous štiavnický ufopas wafer is unique to this town), and a stop at the curious Glanzenberg observatory on the panoramic hill above town.