Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Nature
Góra Świętej Anny
St Anne's Mountain (Góra Świętej Anny), known for its sanctuary and Calvary, is also a former volcano. Some 27 million years ago a cone of lava and tuff rose here, and the dark rock on which the monastery stands is what remains of it. Sinc…
Nature
gmina Niegowa
The Northern Jura Geopark is not a single spot on the map but a scattered geotourism area in the northern part of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, including the area around Olsztyn near Częstochowa. The Polish Geological Institute has publis…
Nature
Kamienna Góra
Rock mushrooms, clubs, towers and pulpits – and some sandstone blocks look like stacks of pancakes piled up by a giant. The Głazy Krasnoludków ("Dwarfs' Rocks") nature reserve, also known as Gorzeszowskie Skałki, protects a 1,200-metre lin…
Nature
Nowa Słupia
The boulder field on Łysa Góra (say "WIH-sah GOO-rah"; the field is called a gołoborze, "goh-woh-BOH-zheh") is the largest expanse of bare quartzite rock in Poland's Holy Cross Mountains. This gray "sea of stones" pours down the northern s…
Nature
Woźniki
Góra Grojec (365 m) is a solitary limestone hill that stands out clearly from the fields between Psary and Lubsza in the Woźniki district of Silesia. Its name hints at an old stronghold ("gród" in Polish), and local tales – recorded among…
Nature
Sandomierz
The rocks beneath your feet here settled on the floor of a Cambrian sea about 500 million years ago. The Pepper Mountains (Góry Pieprzowe), known locally as "Pieprzówki", form a steep escarpment above the Vistula about 2.5 km from Sandomie…
Nature
Olsztyn
These two bare limestone hills outside Olsztyn look as if someone had stacked white bales of goods on the grass, and according to one theory that's exactly where their name comes from (towar means goods in Polish). Góry Towarne hide a cave…
Nature
Stara Wieś
Here some of the water flows out of a rock fissure on the bank, while the rest wells up from the bottom of a pool – an old oxbow of the River Warta. Granatowe Źródła ("Navy Blue Springs"), between Troniny and Stara Wieś, are the only examp…
Nature
Ślemień
"There is a great rock with water running over it, and beneath it a hole into which a hundred head of cattle could be driven" – this is how Andrzej Komoniecki, the mayor of Żywiec, described the spot in 1704 in his chronicle Dziejopis Żywi…
Nature
Złoty Potok
In 1857 Zygmunt Krasiński, one of Poland's great Romantic poets, came across a small cave in the limestone rocks above the Wiercica valley while walking near Złoty Potok. He described it and dug out the first bones of prehistoric animals h…
Nature
Tarnowskie Góry
The Friedrich Mine washing tip in Tarnowskie Góry (Hałda popłuczkowa, pronounced roughly "TAR-nov-skyeh GOO-ri") is a flat-topped, orange mound of mining waste that has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2017. It is the leftov…
Nature
Ojców
A lone, slender limestone spire rises from a meadow at the mouth of the Wrześnik ravine, and in autumn it looks like a burning torch – it is wrapped in Virginia creeper whose leaves turn an intense red. Along with Hercules' Club and the Kr…
Nature
gmina Kroczyce
In 1942 the face of a German quarry cut the cave in two – its middle section was exposed and destroyed, and its two entrances became four. Even so, Głęboka Cave ("Deep Cave") in Góra Zborów near Podlesice is today the only cave in the nort…
Nature
Wierzchowie
In the 19th century the archaeologist Jan Zawisza dug so many mammoth bones out of this cave that he named it Mamutowa – Mammoth Cave. A huge arched opening in the Kluczwoda Valley near Wierzchowie leads into one of Poland's most important…
Nature
Siedlec
In the woods beside the road from Żarki to Janów stands a limestone crag that cavers compare to a block of Swiss cheese. Ostrężnicka Cave runs right through it, with a network of passages about 90–98 m long and six openings, while traces o…
Nature
Brenna
In beech woodland on the southern slope of Trzy Kopce, at about 1,000 m, a 4.3 m shaft opens in a small hollow. Below it runs a maze of fissures and chambers about 1,244 m long – the Trzy Kopce Cave, also known as Klimczok's Grotto, is one…
Nature
Olsztyn
Behind a low opening in a limestone rock, right beside the red Eagles' Nests Trail, lies a chamber of about 10 × 8 m filled with thick flowstone columns up to 1.5 m tall. According to cavers' descriptions, no other cave in the Polish Jura…
Nature
Rzyki
In 1704 the Żywiec mayor and chronicler Andrzej Komoniecki wrote that under a great rock above the village of Las there was a hole so spacious that a hundred head of cattle could be driven into it. Today it is Komoniecki Cave – the most ac…
Nature
Klucze
Beneath the forests of the Klucze municipality, a few kilometres from the Błędów Desert, lie tens of metres of vertical fissures, shafts and chambers. One cave was found when cavers noticed snow melting in winter above a crack breathing ou…
Nature
Lesko
As early as 1896 the Lesko town council resolved that this rock should be a "natural memorial" – which makes the Lesko Stone one of the earliest protected geological monuments in the former Austria-Hungary and in today's Poland. The massiv…
Nature
Bytom
Blachówka is a former open-cast dolomite mine on the boundary between Bytom-Sucha Góra and Tarnowskie Góry-Bobrowniki, worked from 1856 until the 1990s. The pits form a ravine up to 60 m deep, about 200 bats hibernate in the old adits, and…
Nature
Ogrodzieniec
The pale walls of the former quarry of the "Wiek" cement works expose the bed of a Jurassic sea from about 155–160 million years ago – complete with ammonites, belemnites and brachiopods. The pit between Bzów and Ogrodzieniec Castle attrac…
Nature
Olsztyn
The Olsztyn municipality calls this place an "open book of geology", and it is hard to argue. The disused quarry on Kielniki hill, about 1 km south-east of the castle ruins in Olsztyn near Częstochowa, lays bare the inside of a Jurassic hi…
Nature
Bobrowniki
The disused quarry in Rogoźnik, in the Bobrowniki municipality (Będzin County), is for those who prefer wild, overgrown workings to polished attractions. The village lies in a small basin between the Buczyna and Sadowie hills, and the surr…