Inside a wooden house in the Szańce part of Koniaków, the highest village in the Silesian Voivodeship, hangs a trombita more than 11 metres long. According to the regional tourism portal it is probably the longest instrument of its kind in…
Chlebowa Chata (the Bread Cottage) in Górki Małe is an open-air museum, museum and educational farm in one, set at the foot of the Silesian Beskids in the Brennica valley. Since 2005 the hosts have been showing what village life looked lik…
Behind a wall on ulica Cmentarna in Zabrze, modest matzevot (traditional Jewish headstones) stand next to tombs that look like mausoleums from a Christian cemetery. That contrast is the key to the place: the Jewish cemetery in Zabrze, foun…
Behind the basilica of the former Cistercian abbey in Rudy grows a pedunculate oak that was already a giant in 1752, when the German engraver Johann Elias Ridinger included its outline in a print of the monastery. "Cysters" ("The Cistercia…
The Żylica Riverside Promenade (Deptak nad Żylicą) is a walking and cycling path that follows the mountain river through the centre of Szczyrk – from the Town Hall at ul. Beskidzka 4, past St James's Square and the amphitheatre, to the Ska…
The Devil's Bridges (Diabelskie Mosty) are three limestone rocks 15–18 m high, split by deep fissures, in the forest of the Parkowe nature reserve near Złoty Potok. They were named in the 19th century by the poet Zygmunt Krasiński, and nea…
Around 25 waterfalls and rock steps, the tallest of them 5 metres high – these are the Rodło Cascades, the highest waterfalls in the Silesian Beskids, tucked away in the valley of the Biała Wisełka stream in Wisła Czarne. The stream is one…
For more than a century, the land along the Bytomka river was wrecked by a steelworks and mines; today it is crossed by walking and cycling paths. The Bytomka Valley, on the border of Bytom's Łagiewniki and Szombierki districts, is not wil…
The Valley of Three Ponds (Dolina Trzech Stawów, say "DOH-lee-na TSHEH-kh STAH-voof") is Katowice's biggest green escape close to downtown: a park of lakes, woodland, bike paths and skating trails just south of the city center. Locals come…
Despite its name – roughly "the watery valley" – no stream runs along the floor of the Wodąca Valley. This dry karst valley, about 3 km long, between Smoleń near Pilica and Domaniewice near Wolbrom, packs in almost everything the Kraków-Cz…
The Pyramids, the Colosseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower within a few hundred steps of each other, next to realistic dinosaur models and a house built upside down. Dream Park in Ochaby is a family amusement park on natio…
From outside it is a modest shingled church on a high hill in Pochodzita, a hamlet of Laliki. The interior is the surprise: walls and ceiling are covered with scenes scratched into the wood with a nail and knife or burnt into it, the work…
The small wooden Church of St Anne has stood in Lubliniec since 1653, although it has occupied its present spot only since the early 21st century. Between 1999 and 2001 it was dismantled and reassembled, partly with its old beams, and shif…
Three Baroque domes above a shingle roof are visible from afar in Paniowy, now a district of Mikołów, which has one of the prettiest wooden churches in Upper Silesia. Work on the log-built Church of Saints Peter and Paul began in 1757, but…
The wooden Church of St Giles in Podlesie stands in a quiet village on the northern edge of Silesian Voivodeship, in the Włoszczowa Basin, in Lelów municipality. From outside it is a modest, board-clad church under a shingle roof, but the…
The parish of Zrębice appears in the Peter's Pence registers as early as 1334, under the name "Sdrzambicze" – a place cleared of scrub and forest. The wooden Church of St Giles that stands here today was built in 1789, and beside it surviv…
The wooden Church of St John the Baptist in Brusiek stands at the edge of a forest village in Lubliniec County, in the municipality of Koszęcin. According to dendrochronological research it dates from 1593, making it one of the oldest monu…
On a cemetery hill in Księży Las, between Pyskowice and Tarnowskie Góry, stands the wooden Church of St Michael the Archangel, begun in 1497–1498. It is one of the oldest wooden churches in Upper Silesia – a late-Gothic building with shing…
To the left of the high altar in the wooden Holy Trinity Church in Koszęcin stands an oak stump about 2 metres high. According to tradition, it was beside this tree that the miller's daughter Wiktoria repeatedly saw three children asking f…
For more than a century after the town was founded, the people of Miasteczko Śląskie walked to neighbouring Żyglin for Mass. They only built a church of their own — wooden, with a shingled roof and a covered arcade — in 1665–1667, and the…
The Kossak Manor in Górki Wielkie (say "GOOR-kee VYEL-kyeh") is the partly rebuilt ruin of an 18th-century country house in southern Poland's Cieszyn Silesia region, where the Kossak family of artists and writers lived from 1922. Its best-…
In the summer of 1857 the poet Zygmunt Krasiński lived in this single-storey Neoclassical manor house in Złoty Potok – and he gave names to many of the surrounding rocks, springs and ponds, including the Irydion pond below the palace. Toda…
This small manor house with a columned portico, tucked beneath old trees in the hamlet of Bystrzanowice-Dwór, passed through the hands of three well-known families within two centuries: the Bystrzanowskis, the Krasińskis and the Raczyńskis…
Since December 2025 the upper floor of the Neo-Renaissance railway station in Tarnowskie Góry – the former waiting room – has housed the Culture Station (Dworzec Kultury), a branch of the Tarnowskie Góry Museum. Its main attraction is the…