Ore mountains - region and history: Difference between revisions

==Natural potential utilized: curative spas==

The beautiful and variegated landscape went hand in hand with rich cultural heritage – heritage of towns and villages, numerous castles and chateaux, monasteries, churches, parks and arboreta, and lakes – in consequence both the extent and quality of the settlements and the economic development of the region increased. When residual manifestations of volcanic activity through numerous thermal and mineralized springs and spouts were discovered, other types of settlements typical of this region emerged: curative spas. They further increased the variety in the landscape character and exploitation of the natural resources. This was accompanied by specific architecture and building types: spa houses, buildings for temporary guest accommodation, colonnades and promenades, gyms and casinos, open-air theatres, theatres and concert halls, riding schools, park gazebos, maintained walking paths with vistas and resting facilities, and landscaped compositions of spa town surroundings.<ref name = Riha></ref>

==Energy reserves==

The discovery of reserves and possible uses of the energy potential of brown coal in both the basins below the Ore Mountains was a fundamental milestone for the region. The initially tiny and primitive shallow surface “rustic” mining progressively developed into demanding underground extraction in increasingly difficult geological conditions due to the growing demands by emerging manufactures, then industries and railway transport. Surface mining continued to develop where the coal seam was not deep under the surface or even lay exposed on the ground (“in the day” as they used to say). Due to its high calorific capacity, coal soon replaced firewood and charcoal, common in both production and household heating until then, and permitted an unprecedented growth of industry once the steam engine was invented and widespread. It also brought about a radical change in transportation as the railway expanded.

==Communist heavy industry base==

The communist regime, established in 1948, made a cunning use of the people’s disappointment with the Western allies at the Conference of Munich, the anti-German nationalist feelings and its ideology to carry on the psychosis of fear and enmity towards the West and bind Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union. The Ore Mountains and the basin below became an unprecedentedly cheap source of uranium, coal and power for the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia’s national economy, renowned in the First Republic for its balanced proportion of heavy metallurgical, chemical and engineering industries with light and processing industries and a high rate of value-added of input raw materials, became the “forge of the socialist camp” with a dominance of metallurgical and other raw material and energy-intensive heavy industries. This orientation severely harmed all of Czechoslovakia’s national economy, devastated certain regions of the country and was most abominably manifested in the Sokolov-Cheb and North Bohemian Basins. Vast tracts of the landscape, spanning hundreds of square kilometres, were devastated due to opencast coal mining and sinking of underground mines, extraction of kaolin, gravel, sand, ceramic clays and construction stone, erection of gigantic power plants, power and heat distribution systems and dumps for power plant fly ash. The landscape character with the round hillsides and plateaux of the Ore Mountains, covered with forests and peat bogs, both the basins with fertile farmland and clear watercourses, preserved in a harmonious form until the World War, was transformed into an “industrial landscape” filled with new land formations due to shifting millions of cubic metres of rock and earth, industrial and storage buildings, deposits and dumps. The dense network of linear transport and technical infrastructures cut the once continuous countryside into fragments difficult to access and manage, upset its harmony, liveability and passability for both game and people. Natural plant environments disappeared, replaced by weeded patches and invasive non-native plant and animal species. Towns and villages where tens of thousands of people once lived were wiped out, along with thousands of cultural and natural heritage sites wiped out due to coal mining and the power plants fuelled by the extracted brown coal - to be precise, 106 municipalities, including the 650 year old royal city of Most were eliminated this way <ref name = Riha></ref>(see [http://www.zanikleobce.cz/index.php? Exctinct villages]).