Specialty coffee in Jelenia Gora

Jelenia Góra made its money on linen so fine it was called voile, and the whole valley around it was called the linen Eldorado. The merchants here set the price of voile across Europe; in the middle of the eighteenth century several dozen of them lived within the walls, and the first such cloth was woven by the granddaughter of a burgher who had brought drawings of looms back from the Netherlands. It ended fast: cheap cotton from the colonies and the steam engine pushed linen out of the market, merchants went bankrupt one after another, weavers went hungry. The Renaissance townhouses around plac Ratuszowy are all that is left of that fortune.