Čistá u Rovné

Jeronym Mine

The Jeroným Mine, a national cultural monument west of the former Royal Mining Town of Čistá (formerly also the Town of Litrbachy), is a unique witness to the mining culture and skills of our predecessors.The miners were interested in tin ores formed by cassiterite grains dispersed in the rock. The deposit was formed at the contact of an intrusion of albitic lithno-topaz granite of the Čistá-Krásno type with paragules. Two main types of ores occur in it: impregnation mineralization forming up to 20 m thick bodies in greisenized granites and mineralized quartz veins of a maximum decimeter thickness intersecting the granites and the gneiss mantle.The beginnings of deep mining at Čistá date back to the 16th century. 

Entrance area of the Jeroným mine with information center

The reason for the orientation towards the disproportionately more expensive extraction of primary ores was the exhaustion of tin-bearing placer deposits in the Slavkov Forest. In 1551, the Czech King Ferdinand I elevated Čistá to a royal mining town, granting it a number of rights and freedoms. The town had its own tin weight, tin smelter and the right to freely mine timber in the royal forests. However, the yields of the local mines were not as rich as in nearby Krásno; according to estimates, they provided about 500–700 tons of tin throughout its history. The Jeroným Mine was therefore never as rich and famous as other works in the area, but it has been preserved in its original form. Some of the mine chambers are thirty meters long, ten meters wide and up to eight meters high. Underground, there are chambers, rest areas, ledges and corridors with characteristic economical profiles. In a number of chambers, the walls and ceilings are colored black from soot that settled when starting a fire. 

The walls of some corridors are furrowed with grooves from the irons and pickaxes of the miners of that time.With numerous breaks and varying yields, the mines in Čistá were in operation until the end of World War I, with exploration mining operations taking place in 1940-1943 and 1964-1966.Since 1996, work has been underway to make the mine accessible, and in 2013 the mine was officially opened to the public. Since May 2015, a new entrance building with a parking lot has been open to visitors. The building received an honorable mention for urban and architectural solutions in the “Construction of the Karlovy Vary Region 2015” competition.