Hrádek — “the little castle” — stands on Barborská, the lane between the old town and St Barbara’s. It was rebuilt in the 1490s by Jan Smíšek of Vrchoviště, a mine owner rich enough to endow his own chapel in the cathedral, and it has housed the Czech Museum of Silver since 1970. The museum’s subject is the reason the town exists at all.
Route I, “City of Silver”, is the indoor exhibition over two floors: the geology of the ore veins, the archaeology of the medieval town, the history of Hrádek itself, how the silver aristocracy lived, and a numismatic display of what came out of the mint. It costs CZK 100 and you can walk it without a guide.
Route II, “The Way of Silver”, is the one to book. It runs about 90 minutes, guided only. Above ground it follows ore from the vein to the coin — a replica shaft, an original horse-powered winding whim (trejv), medieval ore processing, minting. Then you are dressed in a perkytle, the hooded white canvas coat Kutná Hora miners wore, given a helmet and a lamp, and taken down a 33 m staircase built inside an old ventilation shaft to a gallery about 22 m below the surface. Roughly 250 m of it is open. The tunnels join the pits of the Osel (“Donkey”) and Čapčoch veins, cut between the 14th century and the early 16th, when the Osel was among the deepest and richest mines in the town. The walls still carry the marks of the hammer and chisel that made them, because that is how they were made.
The restrictions are real and worth reading before you travel. Children under six may not enter the mine at all; six- to ten-year-olds only with an adult, two children per adult. The museum advises against it for anyone with claustrophobia, heart, nerve or serious respiratory conditions, restricted mobility, poor sight or late pregnancy. Groups are capped at 25, you need one hand free for the lamp and the other for the rock, and sensible shoes matter. If any of that rules you out, ask for Route II without the mine — the same above-ground route for CZK 110, which most people do not know exists.
It closes on Mondays and shuts entirely for February. From the door it is four minutes uphill to the cathedral the miners paid for.
