Tarnowskie Góry

Tarnowskie Góry is a city with an area of 83.72 square kilometres, inhabited by over 57 thousand people. Gory, i.e. in old-Polish mines were established here on the land of the village of Tarnowice, hence the name of the town Tarnowskie Góry. They are located in the vicinity of the Nakło-Chechło Lake.

Since 2017, the local post-mining monuments have been included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. These include, among others, the historic Silver Mine and the Black Trout Adit, which are located on the Industrial Monuments Route. In the adit, tourists can take a boat ride through the longest underground canal in Poland, which is 600 metres long. The name of the adit originates from a trout, which can be seen in the water at a depth of nearly 1 metre. When light is cast on it, it is black.

In the mine, in turn, you can explore galleries, chambers and a multimedia museum. Here you can take a ride on a miniature narrow-gauge train, visit the Gallery under the Dome, see the water wheel, mining stones and the famous mining lift called szola, which has served more than 2 million tourists for 30 years. Since the time when the Tarnobrzeg underground facilities were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, they have become increasingly more popular and attracted tourists’ interest. In just two months of 2017 they were visited by nearly 117 thousand tourists.

The Tarnowskie Góry are famous for their 1.6-metre-high sculptures of silver miners at work called “gwarki”. They are holding a miner’s lamp in their hands. They are located on Krakowska Street, Piłsudskiego Street, on the Market Square and on the Kaczyniec roundabout.

Carl Wernicke, a world-famous pathologist, psychiatrist and neurologist, was born in Tarnowskie Góry. He owes his reputation and fame to research on brain damage. It was Wernicke who first described the sensory aphasia and discovered the cortical speech centre.

One of the most recognizable landmarks of Tarnowskie Góry is the Black Trout Adit.