Banská Bystrica

48° 44' 16.16" N 19° 8' 52.99" E [48.7378, 19.1481] (KML)

Banska Bystrica is situated in central Slovakia between the national parks Velka Fatra and Nizke Tatry [M] (north of the city), the national park Polana (east of the city), and the Stiavnicke Vrchy (southwest of the city). Banska Bystrica is the capital of the region (kraj) Banska Bystrica. It has 81,704 inhabitants (2005)

There is no flight to and from Banská Bystrica [M] (Sliac Airport) since 2007. The Airport is closed since April 2009.

There are train connections to the major Slovak cities. It can also be reached from Vienna, Budapest, Poland and the Czech republic by direct train.

Banská Bystrica [M] has road connections to all major Slovak cities. It can be reached from Bratislava [M] through the highway R1. Banská Bystrica also has road connections to: Ruzomberok (52km) road 59/E77, Zvolen (19km) road R1/E77, Martin (59km) road 65.

There are bus connections to all major Slovak cities. Vienna and the Czech republic can also be reached from Banská Bystrica [M] easily by bus.

Banská Bystrica [M] has a beautiful position between the mountains. Therefore it's a popular summer and winter resort. The heart of the old city is the SNP square from which dates back to the 13th century. You can find a lot of Renaissance and jugendstil buildings here. Some sights are:

• The church of Assumption of the Virgin Mary. This is a roman church which was expanded in the gothic era.

• The house of Veit Mühlstein. This house belonged to a medieval miner who built this enormous house beside the town square.

• The central Slovak museum (Stredoslovenske Muzeum) in a beautiful renovated renaissance house.

• The museum of the SNP (the slovak national uprising) with objects and documents of the resistance in the 2nd world war. You can also find the grave of the unknown soldier, and original Russian planes here.

Text content was last edited at 12:05, on 27 April 2010 by Wikitravel user Burmesedays. Based on work by Todd VerBeek and David Bank and Anonymous user(s) of Wikitravel. A list of contributors is available at the original article on Wikitravel. This text content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.