Centuries of mining and a town at its peak

The Gold Mine in Złoty Stok operates today as a tourist attraction, but it conceals workings from mining that in this location dates back to the Middle Ages. The traditions of extracting gold and arsenic around Złoty Stok are among the oldest in the region. The town experienced its golden age in the 16th century: at that time nearly 200 mines and 20 smelters operated here, and Złoty Stok supplied around 8 percent of all European gold production. The scale of this output, for such a small town at the foot of the Złote Mountains, stood out even by continental standards.

Mining continued uninterrupted through the following centuries, with varying intensity, right up to the 20th century. In 1907, an electric narrow-gauge railway with a gauge of 500 millimetres was launched, used to carry ore out of the galleries to the railway station in Złoty Stok - a sign that, despite centuries of exploitation, mining still had an industrial scale.

From gold to poison: an arsenic factory

Over time, the deposits of pure gold began to run out, but the ore still contained many other minerals - including arsenopyrite, from which arsenic could be extracted. The method of extracting poisonous arsenic from post-mining spoil heaps was developed in Złoty Stok by the apothecary Hans Scharffenberg. Thanks to this, the town became one of the main centres for producing this poison in the whole of Europe - the raw material from the Złote Mountains went into the market for pesticides, dyes and, indirectly, chemical weapons.

Working on arsenic production was mortally dangerous for miners and smelter workers. Arsenic compounds are highly toxic when the dust and fumes are inhaled, and 19th- and 20th-century working conditions in the mines were far from today's safety standards. A trace of those times can still be seen on the tourist route today: in one of the two main galleries open to visitors, one section still bears the name the Corridor of Death.

The size of the underground labyrinth

More than 300 kilometres of galleries run beneath Złoty Stok - a scale that places the local workings among the largest post-mining systems in this part of Europe. Over the whole period of exploitation, a total of around 16 tonnes of pure gold and as much as 125,000 tonnes of arsenic were extracted here. These figures show that while gold was present from the start, in terms of sheer mass it was the production of poison that later came to dominate the history of local mining.

Only a small fraction of the vast system of corridors has been made accessible for visiting. The main route is made up of the Black Adit (Sztolnia Czarna) together with the neighbouring Gertruda Adit - over half a kilometre of galleries in total, which can only be visited with a guide. A separate route is formed by the Ochre Adit (Sztolnia Ochrowa), notable for the unusual, intense colours of the rock in the corridor - the result of iron compounds and other minerals present in the walls of the workings.

The underground waterfall and other curiosities of the route

The biggest attraction of the Black Adit is the only underground waterfall in Poland - deep in the workings, where the old miners expected nothing but the toil of extracting ore, a cascade of water now flows through the rock corridor. The exact height of the drop is given differently depending on the source, so it is better to see it on site than to rely on a single figure.

Part of the route also leads through water - the tour includes a boat crossing through a flooded section of the workings, one of the few such attractions in Poland's tourist underground sites. Another curiosity of the mine is the Museum of Warnings, Remarks and Appeals, set up in one of the corridors: a collection of several hundred old warning signs and workplace safety regulations, many of which - unlike the stern tone of a typical health-and-safety sign - now have a humorous ring to them. The collection grew partly thanks to tourists who brought in their own finds in exchange for a souvenir.

The end of mining and the birth of a tourist attraction

After the Second World War the mine was taken over by the Polish state, but working the deposit, carried on here uninterrupted for centuries, had stopped paying its way. In 1961 mining was finally shut down as unprofitable. The workings stood empty for the following decades, until on 28 May 1996 the Gold Mine was opened on their site as a tourist attraction - one of the first in Poland to open a former mine working to visitors on such a scale.

Today the complex is open every day, and besides the underground routes it also offers a reconstruction of an old mining settlement, gold panning and guided tours. Above the town itself rises Góra Krzyżowa (Cross Mountain), on the summit of which stands the St Anne's Chapel on Góra Krzyżowa in Złoty Stok from 1731, founded by Siegmund Kehler, leaseholder of the local lime kilns - another trace of the era when Złoty Stok lived off what the earth gave it. The town's mining past is also linked to a darker place: the former gallows, erected in 1558 with the consent of Duke Ernest of Bavaria, where sentences were carried out on condemned prisoners.