We're taking advantage of today's rainy day to visit the Dorothea-Stolln in Cunersdorf.
The guided tour with boat ride is canceled due to illness.
We're joining the so-called short tour.
Equipped with protective clothing, we walk to the entrance and enter the tunnel.
The passage is dark, the walls damp, and the path leads us across the wooden walkway.
The water ripples beneath.
The temperature in the tunnel is always around 8 degrees Celsius.
Mining began around 1530 primarily with the extraction of silver, but later cobalt ore was added.
The rock is massive, and the tunnel was driven into the rock with great effort.
In the early days of mining, the tunnels were just 50 cm wide and 1 m high.
Looking to the side, we can also see a piece of this original size.
It's hard to imagine how laborious and difficult the work was.
The tunnel was driven 2-3 cm into the rock every day.
While the shift used to be 12 hours, the strain meant that the miners usually only reached an age of 30 to 40.
Later, the tunnels were widened, and in 1853, rails for the mine trolley were laid.
In some places, it's pitch black.
We repeatedly see traces of iron, copper, and other minerals on the rock.
There are three levels above and seven levels below us.
Today, the tunnels are approximately 50 km long.
We reach the small tunnel junction, where several tunnels meet 60 m underground.
Supported by bricks, a section collapsed in 1993.
Shortly afterwards, we find ourselves in the large tunnel junction, 75 m underground.
People have been working their way through here with picks and chisels for hundreds of years.
Continuing along the path, we see more and more brick vaults built in the 19th century.
Here, the passages above and below were sealed.
We pass the explosives storage area and shortly after see examples of work tools and a blast hole.
Everyone is allowed to try out a hammer and pick on a wall.
We head back.
The path leads us out the way we came.
The sun is now shining.
An interesting tour through the mine, with a total of about 1.5 km underground.
The difficulty of the former work is hard to imagine: dark, dusty, narrow, and damp.
With the low ceilings, I even had to try on a helmet several times and got scratched.