Kutna Hora: The pleasure is all mine

Kutna Hora is a popular day trip east out of Prague, but there's plenty to see and do to keep you here for much longer. The place's grand, Prague-like architecture was built on a silver fortune: this was a mining boom town from the 1300s, until the ores began to run out in the 1500s.

The silver supplied the mint. Václav II centralised all the hitherto sporadic local mints here in the 1300s, establishing a standard currency: the Prague Groschen, a kind of proto-euro. It's in the Italian Court, and is well worth seeing. Like those strong-armed smithies of old, you get to hammer your own Prague Groschen - not out of silver, obviously, but of aluminium.

The mines were pretty much exhausted by the 1700s, and all have collapsed or flooded... except for one, which you can also visit. Hrádek, the silver museum, does guided tours of the tunnels. It's great fun - and not for claustrophobics, obviously.

You wear a white jacket, just like the miners had, and a helmet, which the miners didn't have, and which you will be very glad of when you bump your head on the low ceilings and narrow walls a thousand times. You also have a headtorch, which the miners didn't have either - they had an animal fat lamp with a weak, buttery light.

It's sobering to confront the reality of working life for those miners of six centuries ago - to see the cramped and dangerous tunnels they stooped and crawled in, and the remarkable but primitive systems they had for ventilation and transport this far underground. The deepest shafts reached around 500m below the surface.

Of course, there are other subterranean parts of Kutna Hora that are much more comfortable. The wine cellars under the Palace Hotel, for instance, or the vaults of atmospheric and friendly restaurants and pubs such as Dačický or V Ruthardce...

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