Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Old towns & squares
Przyrów
For more than a century and a half Przyrów was officially a village, yet its market square never stopped looking like a town's. Researchers studying small towns stripped of their status by the Tsarist reform of 1869–1870 ranked it second o…
Old towns & squares
Pszczyna
Every day at noon a bugle call rings out over the market square in Pszczyna, but it is not a solemn fanfare: it is based on a cheeky local folk song. The square, stretched from east to west, is one of the largest in southern Poland and kee…
Old towns & squares
Racibórz
Racibórz Market Square (Racibórz: rah-CHEE-boorsh) is the heart of one of the oldest towns in Upper Silesia, the historic industrial and cultural region of southern Poland. It is the natural place to start if you are looking for things to…
Old towns & squares
Siewierz
For almost three and a half centuries this square was the centre of a duchy ruled by the bishops of Kraków. Siewierz Market Square was laid out when the town received its charter in 1276, and it still keeps its medieval plan, with streets…
Old towns & squares
Skoczów
Skoczów Market Square is an almost square plaza with streets running out from its corners – the surviving medieval layout of a town that the chronicler Jan Długosz called the first town on the upper Vistula. It is dominated by a late-Baroq…
Old towns & squares
Sławków
Sławków Market Square is the heart of a former town of the Bishops of Kraków, which grew rich on lead and silver and on the trade route from Kraków to Wrocław. In the square stands a town hall of 1905, and on one side the wooden Austeria,…
Old towns & squares
Tarnowskie Góry
The Market Square in Tarnowskie Góry is considered one of the finest town squares in Upper Silesia. It is an irregular trapezium 108 m long – the gwarkowie, the town's ore miners, built their houses next to mine shafts rather than along a…
Old towns & squares
Ustroń
Ustroń's market square is not a medieval plaza lined with town houses but a modern space in front of the town hall, remodelled in 2008. Where a car park and taxi rank once stood, there are now benches, a fountain and a small stage under an…
Old towns & squares
Wisła
Wisła has no classic medieval market square. Its heart is Bogumił Hoff Square (plac Bogumiła Hoffa), shaped in the 1930s when this Beskid village was turning into a fashionable resort. The square is named after the man who "discovered" Wis…
Old towns & squares
Woźniki
Woźniki received market rights around 1270, making it one of the oldest towns in Upper Silesia. Its market square keeps its medieval layout, protected as a heritage site together with the houses lining it. On the square stand a town hall b…
Old towns & squares
Żywiec
Żywiec's market square was probably laid out in the first half of the 15th century, when the people of flood-prone Old Żywiec moved to the foot of Grojec hill. The regular, four-sided square has survived fires, floods and wars, and today,…
Mountains & peaks
Żabnica
Rysianka (roughly "rih-SHAN-kah") is a 1,322 m (4,337 ft) peak in the Żywiec Beskids, a range of the Western Carpathians in southern Poland near the Slovak border. Hikers come for the wide meadow just below the summit and its PTTK mountain…
Monuments & mounds
Tarnowskie Góry
Miners holding lamps are Tarnowskie Góry's answer to the dwarfs of Wrocław. Since 2013 the town has unveiled a new outdoor sculpture of a 'gwarek' every year, and by December 2024 there were twelve of them – from the Market Square to outly…
Monuments & mounds
Ruda Śląska
Wrocław has its dwarfs, Katowice its beboks, and Ruda Śląska has cats. Several cast cats in an identical pose sit in different parts of the city, made from melted-down keys that residents brought to the town hall. More than 100 kilograms o…
Museums
Częstochowa
In 1661 King John Casimir received Cossack envoys in this hall, and the next day the ambassadors of the Tsar – for a few days a monastery room became the throne room of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Knights' Hall on the first flo…
Churches & monasteries
Żarki
According to tradition, in 1382 Duke Władysław of Opole, who was carrying the Black Madonna icon to Jasna Góra, stopped in the forest near Żarki and prayed for water – and a spring gushed from beneath a stone. The Shrine of Our Lady of Leś…
Churches & monasteries
Korbielów
The brick church with a red roof in the centre of Korbielów holds a painting that has travelled a long way: from Bohorodczany in Poland's former eastern borderlands, now in Ukraine, to this village below Pilsko. Since 1974 the image of the…
Churches & monasteries
Podzamcze
On the road from Ogrodzieniec to Pilica, in Podzamcze near the ruins of Ogrodzieniec Castle, a bright chapel with a glazed front stands beneath a limestone crag. This is the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rock, whose story begins with a vill…
Churches & monasteries
Zawiercie
In Skarżyce, a separate village until 1977 and now part of Zawiercie, stands a church you could not mistake for any other in the Jura. Three white chapel rotundas, symbolising the Holy Trinity, adjoin a 12th-century stone tower. The Church…
Churches & monasteries
gmina Pilica
The painting before which pilgrims pray in Pilica-Biskupice measures just 37.5 × 25 cm, and according to tradition it was found in a roadside inn by a bishop who stumbled upon two boards that together formed an image of the Virgin. Today t…
Churches & monasteries
Częstochowa
Pauline monks have lived on this limestone hill in Częstochowa since 1382, when Duke Władysław of Opole brought them from Hungary. The monastery holds the icon of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. It is the most important pilgrimage site f…
Churches & monasteries
Przyrów
On the traditional pilgrim route to Jasna Góra, about 35 km east of Częstochowa, a late Gothic wooden figure of St Anne with the Virgin and Child has been venerated for more than five hundred years. Around it grew a Baroque monastery compl…
Churches & monasteries
Koziegłowy
The image of St Anthony in Koziegłówki was painted in Rome and blessed by Pope Pius V in 1568. It reached this village in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland in the 17th century and now hangs in a church that looks more like an Italian basilica…
Fortifications
Bobrowniki
In the Wesoła settlement of Dobieszowice, above the floodplain of the Brynica river, a low concrete block with an armoured cupola rises out of an earth embankment. This is heavy combat bunker no. 52 – the key structure of the "Wesoła" Comb…