Municipality of Trbovlje

Trbovlje built Europe's tallest chimney—360 meters of reinforced concrete poured in 210 days, requiring 11,866 cubic meters of concrete and 1,079 tons of steel. The height was functional, not symbolic: emissions from the thermal power plant had to escape the narrow Sava valley regardless of weather conditions. Now the chimney marks a power station that closed in 2016, a monument to energy that no longer generates.

Coal mining began here in 1804, at Bukova gora (Beech Mountain) south of town. The Austrian Southern Railway connected Trbovlje in 1849, accelerating extraction. At peak, the mine supplied 700,000 tonnes of lignite annually to the power station. Population reached 19,000. When the Rudnik Trbovlje-Hrastnik mine closed in March 2014, the fuel supply ended. The power plant followed. Population dropped to 16,000 as workers left for Ljubljana or emigrated entirely.

The INSPIRATION project now positions industrial heritage as tourist attraction. Cave-athlons and underground marathons use mine tunnels for spectacle. New media art occupies industrial buildings. The strategy attempts to convert productive infrastructure into experiential destination—a common post-industrial pivot, though success varies.

By 2026, Trbovlje will likely continue its tentative transformation. The chimney remains—too expensive to demolish, too prominent to ignore. It stands as accidental memorial to extractive economy: impressive, obsolete, impossible to repurpose.