Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Selected city: katowice
Technical monuments
Katowice
When a model of the planned Katowice arena appeared on the covers of European architecture magazines in 1960, the organising committee of the Rome Olympics asked to borrow it for an art exhibition. Eleven years later the "flying saucer" la…
Museums
Katowice
Above ground you see only glass cuboids, the brick buildings of a former mine and a headframe. The actual Silesian Museum is hidden underground: its galleries occupy underground levels beneath the site of the closed "Katowice" coal mine. I…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Katowice
The Cathedral of Christ the King in Katowice (Katowice: kah-toh-VEE-tseh) is the mother church of Upper Silesia, Poland's historic industrial heartland, and one of the most monumental churches built anywhere in the country in the 20th cent…
Churches & monasteries
Katowice
Panewniki Basilica – officially the Basilica of St. Louis the King and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary – is a Neo-Romanesque Franciscan church in Katowice, southern Poland, best known for one of the largest moving nativity scenes…
Amusement parks
Katowice
Bajka Pana Kleksa (Mr Blot's Fairy Tale) is a family centre for play and learning in the former Porcelain Factory in Katowice: more than 1,400 m² of puzzles, experiments and sets inspired by Jan Brzechwa's novels about Professor Klex. It i…
Technical monuments
Katowice
In front of Katowice station stand 16 reinforced-concrete "chalices" – columns that flare upwards like concrete flowers. They echo the famous Brutalist station of 1972, demolished in 2010–2011 despite protests from architects. Today's stat…
Technical monuments
Katowice
The Szyb Wilson Gallery at 1 Oswobodzenia Street in Katowice's Janów-Nikiszowiec district occupies the former miners' assembly hall and bathhouse of the Wilson shafts of the Wieczorek coal mine. It has been open since 2001, and with nearly…
Landmarks
Katowice
The oldest building in Katowice was not built in Katowice. The wooden Church of St Michael the Archangel stood in Syrynia near Wodzisław Śląski for more than four centuries, and in 1938 it was taken apart beam by beam and reassembled on Be…
Museums
Katowice
Until the 1980s, women from Nikiszowiec carried baskets of bed linen here, scrubbed it on washboards in masonry troughs and ran it through an electric mangle. Today the old laundry at Rymarska 4 houses the City Ethnology Department of the…
Other
Katowice
The NOSPR building in Katowice, home of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, is one of Europe's finest modern concert halls and the most striking piece of architecture in the city. Clad in dark brick with vivid red recesses, it st…
Museums
Katowice
In the Brynów district of Katowice stands the red-brick former clothing store of the Wujek coal mine. On 16 December 1981, three days after martial law was declared in communist Poland, a special riot-police (ZOMO) platoon fired on strikin…
Other
Katowice
Every December the high altar and side aisles of the neo-Romanesque Franciscan basilica in Katowice-Panewniki disappear behind a Bethlehem landscape measuring 18 m high, 32 m wide and 10 m deep. The Panewniki crib is regarded as Europe's l…