The twin towns of Annaberg and Buchholz grew from silver. In the late fifteenth century a strike in the Ore Mountains set off a rush, and Annaberg was founded as a mining town with remarkable speed, while neighbouring Buchholz joined it later to form the double-barrelled name you see on the signs. The wealth shows in the St Annen church, a vast late-Gothic hall with a soaring vault, which stands over the market square like a promise made by men who suddenly had money. The wider mining landscape was inscribed by UNESCO in 2019, with its counterpart across the border in Jáchymov, where silver coins were once minted that gave the world the word thaler, and eventually the dollar.
The ride up here is a good one. The Erzgebirge on the Saxon side is a hilly, wooded plateau of small towns and steep valleys, with roads that climb and fall in honest, medium-speed curves. The Fichtelberg, the highest point in Saxony at about 1,215 metres, is a short ride away, and the Pöhlberg rises just by the town. Weather is more severe than the lowlands, so winter brings snow and ice, while summer is cool and pleasant. Autumn mist can fill the valleys, and the forest turns copper.
Annaberg-Buchholz is a town of twenty-odd thousand people, so you will find fuel, restaurants and shops without difficulty. This is also Christmas country, famous for wooden carvings, candle arches and pyramids that spin above the table. If you pass through in December the market is very good, though a motorbike is a poor choice that month. In other seasons the shops are open year-round for wooden crafts.
Adam Ries, a sixteenth-century calculating master who taught Germans to use Arabic numerals, lived in Annaberg and gave German the phrase nach Adam Riese, roughly meaning according to the correct arithmetic. It is a nice touch that a town built on silver is also tied to the idea of doing the sums properly.