Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Hidden gemMuseums
Gniezno
The Museum of the Origins of the Polish State in Gniezno (say "GNYEZ-no") is the best place to understand why this small city in western Poland is called the country's first capital. Archaeological finds, Romanesque art and 19th-century hi…
Hidden gemZoos
Chorzów
In the 1950s one of Poland's largest zoos grew up on former mining wasteland between Chorzów and Katowice. The Silesian Zoological Garden covers about 47.5 ha of the Silesian Park, and for half a century its trademark has been a rocky holl…
Hidden gemLakes
Międzybrodzie Bialskie
Lake Międzybrodzie fills the gorge of the River Soła through the Little Beskids and looks rather like a mountain fjord: narrow, about 5 km long and squeezed between wooded slopes. It was created in 1937 behind the Porąbka Dam, co-designed…
Hidden gemLakes
Augustów
Linguists trace the lake's name to the Yotvingian word methis, meaning "to throw", and a document from 1396 records it as Meten. Necko is a glacial ribbon lake that makes Augustów both a town and a resort: the town shore has beaches, prome…
Hidden gemTechnical monuments
Złoty Stok
In the 16th century the mines of Złoty Stok supplied, according to the site's operator, as much as 8 per cent of Europe's gold, and in total some 16 tonnes of pure gold were extracted here. Later the ore was used mainly to produce arsenic.…
Hidden gemMuseums
Sochaczew
Every clock at the Narrow Gauge Railway Museum in Sochaczew shows 15:35. That is the time the last passenger train of the Sochaczew County Railway left here on 30 November 1984. That December a museum was established at the old station, an…
Hidden gemMuseums
Wenecja
The Narrow Gauge Railway Museum in Wenecja (say "veh-NETS-yah") is an open-air collection of 600 mm gauge locomotives and rolling stock in the Pałuki lake district of central Poland, described by its operator as one of the largest of its k…
Hidden gemMuseums
Opole
The Museum of the Opole Countryside (Muzeum Wsi Opolskiej) is an open-air museum in Opole's Bierkowice district, about 5 km from the city center. Around 50 wooden buildings brought from villages across the region – farmhouses, granaries, a…
Hidden gemTechnical monuments
Wałbrzych
The last cart of coal came up from the Julia mine on 20 September 1996, and less than two decades later the site reopened as one of Poland's largest industrial heritage centres. At the Old Mine (Stara Kopalnia) in Wałbrzych you are often g…
Hidden gemMountains & peaks
Tarnowskie Góry
The Black Trout Adit in Tarnowskie Góry (Sztolnia Czarnego Pstrąga, roughly SHTOL-nya CHAR-neh-go PSTRON-ga) is a 600-meter stretch of a 19th-century drainage tunnel that visitors explore by boat, deep underground. It formed part of the sy…
Hidden gemLandmarks
Ojców
The Kraków Gate (Brama Krakowska) in Ojców (say "OY-tsoof") is a pair of towering limestone pillars that guard the mouth of a side gorge in the Prądnik Valley, the heart of Ojców National Park. Just 25 km north of Kraków, it is one of the…
Hidden gemMuseums
Łódź
The Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź (say: WOODGE) is Europe's largest museum devoted to textiles, fashion and the textile industry. It occupies the White Factory, a grand 19th-century cotton mill built by industrialist Ludwik Geyer at 2…
Hidden gemMuseums
Wiślica
On the wall of one room a small haloed figure kneels beneath a Gothic inscription reading "Lord, have mercy on us". Scholars believe it portrays Jan Długosz – the great medieval chronicler who in 1460 paid for this house for the clergy of…
Hidden gemMuseums
Kraków
Jan Matejko, Poland's great painter of national history, bought this manor house in 1876 with money from the sale of his painting "Batory at Pskov" – mainly so that his often sickly children could breathe country air. In Krzesławice, now p…
Hidden gemMuseums
Wrocław
Under a grassy mound on Na Grobli Street lies a 19th-century underground reservoir that stored Wrocław's drinking water for more than a hundred years. Today it houses Hydropolis, Poland's only science centre devoted entirely to water, wher…
Hidden gemCaves
Ojców
In 2018 archaeologists found finger bones of a Neanderthal child in Ciemna Cave ("Dark Cave") dating back about 115,000 years – the oldest known human remains in Poland. The cave on Koronna Hill in Ojców National Park has the largest chamb…
Hidden gemOld towns & squares
Kraków
The Little Market Square (Mały Rynek, say "MAH-wih RIH-nek") in Kraków is a long, cobbled square tucked directly behind St. Mary's Basilica – a calmer sidekick to the vast Main Market Square and one of the oldest trading spots in the city.…
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…
Landscape parks
gmina Stoczek
Introduction The Bug is not a river that stays neatly in place. Across the Nadbużański Landscape Park it still bends through broad meanders, cuts into sandy banks, creates islands and sandbars and leaves old channels behind as oxbow lakes.…
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…
Hidden gemLakes
Kamień Pomorski
From the waterfront in Kamień Pomorski you look out over flat water, reed beds and a green island – and in the shallows off that island lies a granite giant carried here from Sweden by an ice sheet. Kamień Lagoon (Zalew Kamieński) is a wid…
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…
Zoos
Hel
The Hel Seal Sanctuary (Fokarium, roughly "foh-KAH-ryoom") is a small seal center at the tip of the Hel Peninsula on Poland's Baltic coast, run by the University of Gdańsk Marine Station. Here you can watch Baltic grey seals up close and l…