Krupka Mining Landscape is the oldest tin mining district in Central Europe and is centred on the typical Czech medieval mining town of Krupka that is nestled in the steep valley traversed by Husitská Street on its winding route from the foot of the Ore Mountains (300 m elevation) to Horni Krupka (700 m elevation), from where the mountain pass connects with Germany a mere 2 km away.
Krupka’s relict mining landscape reveals the exploitation of tin (mostly sub-horizontal greisen veins and massive tin ore) from the 13th to the 20th centuries: from placer workings in the plain below the mountains, to intensive mining via several large open-works (that exploited rich ‘stockworks’) and a series of adits into the hillside that connected with numerous but comparatively shallow shafts on elevated plateaux on the mountainside.
Of special importance is the Steinknochen mining district with an exceptional density of late medieval and early modern mine workings such as sunken shaft and adit mouths and flat heaps giving a rare evidence of the size of mine allotments referred to in the Krupka mining code from 1487. Authentic late medieval and early modern mining monuments are likewise to be found in the Knötel and Komáří hůrka hill mining districts. The much younger Starý Martin adit bears evidence of tin mining techniques in the second half of the 19th and in the 20th century.
