The Ore Mountains silver, Freiberg

For a hundred years this range was where Europe's silver came from.

The Ore Mountains, Erzgebirge in German and Krusne hory in Czech, run along the border between Saxony and Bohemia. The high points are Klinovec on the Czech side at 1,244 metres and the Fichtelberg on the German side at 1,215 metres. UNESCO, which inscribed the whole Erzgebirge and Krusnohori Mining Region as a World Heritage Site in 2019, records that it became the most important source of silver ore in Europe between 1460 and 1560.

Silver was not the end of it. Tin was historically the second metal extracted and worked here, and by the end of the 19th century the region had become a major global producer of uranium. UNESCO puts the span of it at 800 years of almost continuous mining, from the 12th century to the 20th, and credits the region not just with metal but with the technological and scientific innovations that spread outward from it, including pioneering water management systems and new ways of processing ore.

That matters more than it sounds. This range was the setting for the earliest stages of the early modern transformation of mining and metallurgy from a craft into a large-scale industry, a shift that came before the Industrial Revolution and helped make it possible.

The landscape still shows it. Eight centuries of work left tips, dams, ditches and sinkholes that directly shaped not only the ground but the habitats of the plants and animals living on it, and the result is a cultural landscape rather than a wild one.

It is a good place to walk. Above roughly 500 metres on the German side the ground belongs to the Ore Mountains and Vogtland Nature Park, which at 120 kilometres long is the largest of its kind in Germany. The eastern Ore Mountains are protected landscape, with smaller nature reserves and natural monuments on both sides of the border. Along the ridges lie several large raised bogs fed by nothing but rainwater. There are winter sports areas higher up.