Schwaz silver mine

Silver, ore and white gold – in the Middle Ages Schwaz was the mining centre of Europe. Schwaz silver mine invites you to go on an adventurous underground journey into the past.

It began – so the legend goes – in 1409, when the farmhand Gertraud Kandler noticed while looking after the cattle that a bull had uncovered a silver-bearing stone with its horns. Mountain chronicles report that in 1420 these mountains in Falkenstein which were rich had been opened up and lots of foreign mountain people from Bohemia, Saxony and other German states moved to Schwaz.

At the hey-day of silver mining (in the 15th and 16th century) Schwaz was the biggest mining metropolis in Central Europe and with more than 20,000 inhabitants was, after Vienna, the second largest town in Austria. By 1490 Schwaz supplied around 85% of silver production from the most important mining district. At this time Tirol was probably one of the richest states in Europe. In ten years which followed (until 1500) no less than 129,000 kg of silver was gathered from the mountain in Schwaz.

Schwaz silver and the wealth which it generated was the reason that famous artists, architects and master builders visited and moved here. Eminent writer Hans Sachs who was born in Nuremberg also moved to the vibrant mining town of Schwaz when  he was on his travels through southern Germany. Hans Sachs wrote a few theatre plays here and founded a Meistersinger school for the Schwaz people who enjoyed singing. In 1516 Paracelsius stayed in Schwaz for a while and learned about the tradition of silver smelting and the art of alchemy. Today Schwaz silver mine is one of the most interesting cultural attractions in Tirol and provides an adventure-filled underground journey into the past. Getting into Sigmund-Erbstollen takes around eight minutes. The journey goes past old dry-stone walls which were finished by hand with a great deal of painstaking work. Visitors can get to grips with this difficult hand work which was done using mallets and iron; the traces of black powder of the blasting can still be seen and during this 90-minute journey through time into the silver past there is information about the history, mining technology, the coinage system, the various professional groups and the miner's difficult everyday lives.

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