Orłowo Beach, Gdynia

In 1934, soldiers of an army bridge-building battalion from Modlin extended the wooden pier at Orłowo to 430 metres in just two months so that excursion steamers could moor by the beach — at the time Orłowo was competing with neighbouring Sopot, which lay in the Free City of Danzig. Today the pier is 180 metres long, but the beach at its foot is still one of the most distinctive in the Tricity (Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia): to the north it ends at Orłowo Cliff, and fishing boats lie on the sand beside the swimmers.

A pier with a history

The first small landing stage was built here during the First World War, when Orłowo was called Adlershorst. After being extended in the 1920s the pier was 115 metres long and served small passenger boats. In 1934 material from the dismantled passenger pier in Gdynia was reused, and in June 1935 Orłowo Morskie became part of Gdynia. In the winter of 1949 a storm destroyed more than half of the structure; what remained was repaired in 1953. The rebuild of 2006–2007 took ten months and cost PLN 3.5 million — the wooden piles were reinforced with steel bands.

A cliff that retreats a metre a year

Orłowo Cliff is the steep, roughly 650-metre seaward face of Kępa Redłowska, made mainly of glacial till. Wave erosion pushes it back by an average of 1 metre a year. The beach below is strewn with pebbles of igneous and metamorphic rock — including granitoids, porphyries and gneisses — and the dark-brown streaks in the sand are concentrations of heavy minerals such as magnetite and zircon. Broom and protected sea buckthorn grow on the slopes. From the top you can see the Hel Peninsula and the port of Gdynia.

A beach the sea keeps taking back

In 2020 about PLN 2.5 million was spent widening a half-kilometre stretch of beach to around 40 metres, using sand dredged from the Baltic seabed. The sea soon reclaimed it — within months a storm had washed away most sand near the pier, where the beach shrank to about 10 metres. It is a vivid reminder of how dynamic this piece of coast is.

What else you will see

• Fishing boats hauled up on the beach and fishermen sorting their nets after the morning catch.
• The statue of Christ "Blessing of the Sea" — a replica of a 1924 monument that once stood at the edge of the woods by the pier.
• Żeromski's Cottage, where the writer Stefan Żeromski spent his holidays with his family in 1920.
• The Summer Stage of Gdynia's Municipal Theatre, close to the pier.

Tripto tip

Access to the pier is free. The best view of the cliff is from the end of the pier. Do not go right up to the cliff after storms or thaws — the face is active and prone to slips. Allow about an hour for the beach and pier, and if you have more time, walk along the top of Kępa Redłowska for views of the Hel Peninsula and the port.