Hohndorf: Hiking and Mining History

If you are looking for a hotel in Hohndorf, the local hiking routes and mining history can help guide your travel plans. The trails have different focuses: the Coal Mining Trail passes through several municipalities, while other routes highlight historic buildings, former mining sites, or viewpoints. This gives you several ways to discover Hohndorf on foot and learn about its history.

Hiking trails with different focuses

The Coal Mining Trail is an 18-kilometer circular route that crosses the municipalities of Oelsnitz/Erzgebirge, Hohndorf, Gersdorf, and Lugau. It is uniformly marked with 80 signs. A brochure about the trail includes six suggested tours with maps. Its route across several municipalities and the additional suggestions make this trail different from routes focused on places and topics within Hohndorf.

The “Historic Hohndorf” circular trail connects historically significant places and buildings in the municipality. These include the town hall, the church, the Rappelkiste kindergarten, and Glück-Auf School. The trail brings together buildings with different functions and makes local history the guiding theme of the route. If you are particularly interested in Hohndorf’s buildings, this thematic focus offers a different perspective from the intermunicipal Coal Mining Trail.

Mining history in the village and along the trails

The Hohndorf section of the mining heritage trail, which has 43 stops in total, includes five named stops: Vereinigtfeld Shaft I, Vereinigtfeld Shaft III, Helene Shaft, Ida Shaft, and Bergmannsplatz. The stops point to various places in the area’s mining history. The Hohndorf circular hiking trail also heads toward the former Vereinigtfeld Shaft and passes its spoil tip, which is completely overgrown.

Another way to explore local history is Hohndorf’s digital history tour. It tells the stories of historic farms, traditional inns, and former craft businesses. Historical images, documents, and an interactive map help place buildings in the village in their historical context. In this way, stories and images complement the stops on the hiking trails that relate to places, buildings, or mining sites.

One stop on the circular hiking trail is the Schnitzerheim. It houses a mechanical Heimatberg, a traditional model of a mining landscape; the Schnitzerheim also displays a model of Vereinigtfeld Shaft Tower I. Mining and local history are thus represented not only in the landscape and at former sites, but also in a model and a mechanical Heimatberg.

Views and practical information

The Hohndorf circular hiking trail is rated moderate and follows paved paths and roads. It starts and ends at the car park of the “Walderholung” country hotel and restaurant at Fleischerberg 21. The route passes the Waldeck viewpoint, which looks out over Hohndorf’s lower settlement and the residential area by Lichtensteiner Forest. Near the former Vereinigtfeld shafts, at an elevation of 460 meters above sea level, the route offers panoramic views of Hohndorf as a mining village.

The Knappenweg is another of the destinations included on the route. It is a former miners’ settlement reached by the circular hiking trail. Viewpoints, an overgrown spoil tip, and the former settlement provide different highlights along the trail: landscape and mining history are side by side here. Check the route details locally before setting out.

For travel to the circular hiking trail, the listed stops are Hohndorf Wartehalle, served by bus routes 117 and 139, and Hohndorf Mitte, served by rail line 523. Check connections before travelling. For planning purposes, you can bring together several specific details: the trail’s difficulty rating and surface, the car park at the start and end point, and the listed stops.

The wider region

The Erzgebirgskreis has around 4,500 kilometers of signposted hiking trails. This is the regional context for the hiking routes; in Hohndorf itself, the routes described lead to buildings, mining sites, and viewpoints. The Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří Mining Region has also been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since July 2019.

For an overview of the wider travel area: Erzgebirgskreis.