Historic Town of Banská Štiavnica and the Technical Monuments in its Vicinity

Banská Štiavnica is a silver-mining town in central Slovakia. The area was already called terra banensium, the land of miners, in 1156, and the Slavic population named the valley settlement Štiavnica, the acidic stream. In 1238 it became a royal town, one of the first in the Kingdom of Hungary.

In the High and Late Middle Ages the town was the main producer of silver and gold in the Kingdom of Hungary. Against the Ottoman threat it built strong fortifications, including two castles, in the 16th century, and grew into a town of Renaissance palaces and 16th-century churches. In 1627 gunpowder was used in a mine here, one of the first times in the world, and in the 18th century Jozef Karol Hell, Maximilian Hell and Samuel Mikovíny designed the tajchy, a system of reservoirs and channels to drain the flooded mines.

Mikovíny founded a mining school in 1735, and from 1763 the Hofkammer in Vienna, with the support of Maria Theresa, turned it into the Academy of Mining. By 1782 the town had 23,192 inhabitants, the third largest in the Kingdom of Hungary. Mining declined from the later 19th century, but some sixty reservoirs and more than 100 km of channels remain in the hills, and the town and its technical monuments were inscribed in 1993.