Ore Mountain passes

The Ore Mountain passes (German: Erzgebirgspässe) are crossings and passages over the crest of the Ore Mountains in Central Europe, over which tracks, roads, railway lines and pipelines run from the Free State of Saxony in the Federal Republic of Germany to Bohemia in the Czech Republic and vice versa.

The shape of the terrain and the climate are the most important physical-geographic conditions that exert an influence on the course and the design of routes across the Ore Mountains, even today.

Significantly less easy to negotiate, however, is the steep descent to the south towards Bohemia, where the Ore Mountains drop up to 700 metres in less than 10 kilometres.

According to reports by historians in the past, winters in previous centuries in the upper Ore Mountain regions must have been even harder than today.

Floods have occurred repeatedly in the past, most recently in August 2002, when considerable destruction was caused to access roads in the valleys to the Ore Mountain passes.

The old road crossed the Saxon-Bohemian border from Fürstenwalde in the west to Oelsen in the east and ran down the steep escarpment of the Ore Mountains into the Bohemian Chlumec u Chabařovic and on into the interior of the Kingdom of Bohemia.

In Berlin-Schöneberg, Nollendorfplatz and Nollendorfstraße are named after the small Ore Mountain village of Nakléřov (Nollendorf), of which nothing is left today of the church town that according to legend Napoleon watched the battle from.

From 1913 to just after 1950 a 21 metre high observation tower stood on the Nakléřovská výšina, which bore the name Kaiserwarte and, after 1919, Carl Weis Warte.