The Szabadtéri Bányászati Múzeum (Open-Air Mining Museum) is built on the site of one of the original Tatabánya coal pits. Visitors can walk through a section of preserved underground gallery, look at heavy machinery left where it was when the mines closed, and follow the story of the workers — many of them Slovak, German, and Polish — who came to dig coal here from the 1890s onward.
The museum is shabby in places and the signage is mostly in Hungarian, but with a translation app it is genuinely affecting. The coal that fired Hungary's electricity for most of the twentieth century came from these hills, and the museum is honest about what that meant for the men and women who worked the seams.