Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Castles
Tworków
In January 1931, the glow above Tworków could reportedly be seen up to 60 kilometres away – the palace of the von Saurma-Jeltsch family was on fire. Arson for the insurance money was suspected from the start, and the insurer refused to pay…
Castles
Wisła
The Presidential Castle in Wisła ("VEES-wah") is a modernist mountain residence built in 1929–1931 as a gift from the people of Silesia to Polish President Ignacy Mościcki. Its towers deliberately echo a medieval castle, while the interior…
Technical monuments
Międzybrodzie Bialskie
One of the minds behind this dam was Gabriel Narutowicz – a hydraulic engineer who had designed a dam on the Aare in Switzerland and later became the first President of interwar Poland. Since 1936 the concrete dam on the Soła river in Międ…
Technical monuments
Czernichów
The earth dam at Tresna closes the Soła valley between the Żywiec Basin and the Little Beskids and has held back Lake Żywiec since the mid-1960s. It rises 39 m above the valley floor and is over 300 m long, and building it meant flooding e…
Technical monuments
Międzybrodzie Bialskie
The Góra Żar reservoir (pronounced roughly "GOO-rah ZHAR") is an artificial lake on top of a mountain in southern Poland's Little Beskids, above the village of Międzybrodzie Bialskie. It is the upper reservoir of the Porąbka-Żar pumped-sto…
Lakes
Świerklaniec
Kozłowa Góra Reservoir, also called Lake Świerklaniec, was built in the 1930s as… an anti-tank obstacle. In the event of war it was meant to flood the Brynica valley in front of the fortifications of the Silesia Fortified Area. Today it is…
Historic sites
Żywiec
Everyone knows Janosik and the Tatra highlands, but the creator of the Carpathian Outlaws' Trail (Szlak Zbójników Karpackich) argues that the real capital of Carpathian banditry was the Żywiec region. That idea grew into a cultural route t…
Nature
gmina Pilica
The white walls of Zegarowe Skały (Clock Rocks) rise above the treetops on the left slope of the Wodąca Valley, between Smoleń, Złożeniec and Strzegowa. It is one of the most popular groups of climbing rocks in the Polish Jura, and also a…
Nature
Pszczyna
Two bison from the forests of Pszczyna, the cow Planta and the bull Plebejer, were among the twelve animals from which the whole species was rebuilt after the First World War. The best place to learn their story is Jankowice near Pszczyna,…
Museums
Ślemień
The museum in Ślemień calls itself the youngest open-air museum in Poland – it opened in August 2012. On more than 6 hectares beside the road to Kocoń stands a village of the Żywiec Beskids assembled from original buildings moved here from…
Landscape parks
Soblówka
On the summit of Pilsko (1,557 m) dwarf mountain pine grows, and some scientists see traces of ancient glaciers here. Around it lies Żywiec Landscape Park, which its managers describe as the oldest landscape park in the Polish Carpathians.…