Grund Locations

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The village was founded by miners sometime in the mid-13th century, when silver ore began to be mined in the area. In the 1270s, according to records, 300 miners and their families were already permanently settled on the nearby Kuklík hill. Legends say that when King Přemysl Otakar II of Bohemia went to battle and needed horses for his army, he took 500 of them from Kuklík alone, which interrupted mining for a while and the miners had to leave.
Under Wenceslas II, new silver veins were discovered, which attracted new miners. The village began to expand and the German name for it became ‘Grunt in Mariae’ (Valley or Mine of the Virgin Mary, abbreviated to Grunta in Czech). In addition to residential houses, infrastructure for processing the extracted ore also began to appear, as well as facilities for sorting, crushing or smelting. The waste from mining was enormous, so the remaining tailings and slag began to be exported around the area and new landforms were created.
In the village there is also the Church of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. Already in records from 1305 it is written that it was delapidated, so it is not surprising that in 1367 a new church was built by local miners and townspeople of Kuttenberg.
The mining and smelting premises operated here intermittently until the 15th century, when silver reserves were almost exhausted (it is estimated that 80% of the ore was mined here in less than three centuries).

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