Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Hidden gemMuseums
Radzionków
The collection includes so-called bread money – currency that, in times of crisis, could only be used to buy bread. It is one of hundreds of curiosities gathered by a single enthusiast. The Bread Museum in Radzionków (today the Museum of B…
Hidden gemMuseums
Sulejówek
The Józef Piłsudski Museum in Sulejówek (say "soo-leh-YOO-vek") is a striking modern museum and a historic family home on the eastern edge of Warsaw. It tells the life story of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the founding father of independent Po…
Hidden gemMuseums
Kościerzyna
In a locomotive shed from 1929 and on the tracks around it stands the largest collection of rail vehicles in northern Poland – about 45 items of rolling stock, from a 1915 steam engine to the prototype of a Polish diesel locomotive. The Ko…
Museums
gmina Łubowo
You reach the island of Ostrów Lednicki by ferry, and waiting for you are walls that date back to Mieszko I, Poland's first historical ruler: the ruins of a stone palace with a chapel and two baptismal pools that make this one of the stron…
Hidden gemMuseums
Białystok
Białystok's town hall was never home to the city authorities – from the start it was a market hall full of stalls. In 1940 the Soviet authorities demolished it to make room for a statue of Stalin, and today's building is a post-war reconst…
Hidden gemMuseums
Chabówka
At Chabówka near Rabka, more than 100 historic railway vehicles stand on the tracks, and some of them still run. It is the largest collection of heritage rolling stock in Poland and one of the few places where you don't just look at steam…
Hidden gemMuseums
gmina Łubowo
This is more than a collection of old farmhouses. The open-air museum in Dziekanowice, on Lake Lednica, was designed to recreate the structure of a traditional Wielkopolska village: farmsteads gathered around a village square, a wooden chu…
Museums
Wadowice
The John Paul II Family Home in Wadowice (say "vah-doh-VEE-tseh") is a biographical museum in the house where Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, was born on May 18, 1920. At its heart is the reconstructed apartment of the Wojtyła…
Museums
Rzeszów
The Bedtime Cartoon Museum in Rzeszów (Muzeum Dobranocek) is devoted to "dobranocki" – the evening cartoons that Polish children waited for before bed for decades. Its display cases on Mickiewicza Street hold original film puppets of Teddy…
Museums
Łódź
The Factory Museum in Łódź tells the story of Izrael Poznański's textile empire on the very spot where it operated – in the former fabric printing works on the site of today's Manufaktura. Here you can see how cotton became yarn and yarn b…
Museums
Zakopane
Jan Kasprowicz bought the wooden villa at Harenda in 1923 from an English painter for 500 pounds, money he had earned translating Shakespeare. He lived here for only three years, until his death in 1926, but his widow Maria kept the house…
Museums
Wrocław
The Pan Tadeusz Museum in Wrocław is a modern storytelling museum run by the Ossolineum, set in the Baroque House under the Golden Sun on the Market Square. Its centerpiece is the only surviving manuscript of "Pan Tadeusz," Adam Mickiewicz…
Museums
Opole
The Museum of Polish Song in Opole tells the story of Polish popular music from the 1920s to the present – inside the Millennium Amphitheatre, the stage of the National Festival of Polish Song. Instead of display cases you get headphones,…
Museums
Nysa
The Nysa District Museum is the oldest museum in Opole Silesia – it has existed since 1897 and since 1984 has occupied the Baroque Bishops' Palace, the former residence of the bishops of Wrocław, who were also dukes of Nysa. Here you will…
Museums
Hel
The Fisheries Museum in Hel is a branch of Poland's National Maritime Museum, set in the oldest building in town: a Gothic brick church from the 15th century right by the harbor on the Hel Peninsula, north of Gdańsk. Inside are traditional…
Museums
Chrzanów
The Irena and Mieczysław Mazaraki Museum in Chrzanów is the regional museum of western Małopolska, housed in a historic manor building that locals call the "Inkwell" (Kałamarz). It covers the area's prehistory, the old town and its Jewish…
Museums
Zubrzyca Górna
At the heart of this open-air museum is a manor house that was never moved here: it has stood on this spot since the 17th century. The Orava Ethnographic Park in Zubrzyca Górna was the first open-air museum opened in post-war Poland. On al…
Museums
Łódź
The Łódź Palm House is a tropical oasis in Źródliska Park, the city's oldest park: under its glass roof grow around 4,500 specimens of more than 1,100 species and varieties. The most precious are palms that remember the orangeries of Łódź'…
Museums
Wasilków
On almost 30 hectares in Wasilków, just beyond Białystok's northern city limits, stands a village made up of buildings moved here from all over Podlasie: windmills, a watermill, a smithy, cottages of the minor gentry and a Neoclassical man…
Museums
Wolin
Every year in early August hundreds of re-enactors from across Europe arrive on a small island in the Dziwna river to spend a few days living like the people of early medieval Wolin. For the rest of the season the Centre of Slavs and Vikin…
Museums
Olsztynek
The Olsztynek Open-Air Museum (say "ol-SHTIN-ek"), officially the Museum of Folk Architecture – Ethnographic Park, is one of the oldest and largest skansens (open-air museums) in Poland. Spread over about 77 hectares in the Warmia-Masuria…
Museums
Tychy
Tyskie Browarium, officially the Museum of the Tyskie Princely Breweries, is a brewing museum inside a working brewery in Tychy, where beer has been brewed without interruption for almost 400 years. The exhibition fills a restored former P…
Museums
Kraków
The Under the Eagle Pharmacy (Apteka pod Orłem, roughly "AP-teh-kah pod OR-wem") in Kraków is one of the most moving places to visit in Podgórze, the district south of the Vistula where the Nazis sealed off the city's Jewish ghetto in 1941…
Museums
Głogówek
At the very bottom of the tower was an unlit dungeon with a chain fixed to the wall – and that is where the Prison Tower in Głogówek got its name. This square brick tower next to the Castle Gate is one of the few surviving parts of the tow…