Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
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
Stary Sącz
The market square of Stary Sącz looks just as you would picture a small Galician town: low, mostly 19th-century houses, a well beneath lime trees, and paving of Dunajec river cobbles that took 11 years to lay. It is the centre of one of Po…
Old towns & squares
Świdnica
Świdnica Market Square (say shfeed-NEE-tsah) is one of the best-preserved old town squares in Lower Silesia, the historic region of southwest Poland around Wrocław. Colorful Baroque townhouses frame a town hall with a rebuilt lookout tower…
Old towns & squares
Tarnów
Tarnów Market Square (Tarnów is pronounced roughly "TAR-noof") is the heart of a city that Poles like to call the "pearl of the Renaissance." Laid out in 1330, the square is lined with arcaded and gabled townhouses and centered on a striki…
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
Wałbrzych
On top of a corner house on Wałbrzych's Market Square sits an anchor – in a mountain town hundreds of kilometres from the sea. It symbolises the old trading links between Wałbrzych (German: Waldenburg) and lands overseas. The town's oldest…
Old towns & squares
Węgrów
In the sacristy of the church on Węgrów's market square hangs a metal mirror with a Latin inscription claiming that Master Twardowski, Poland's own Faust, once used it for sorcery, before it was "converted" to the service of God. That lege…
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
Ząbkowice Śląskie
Ząbkowice Śląskie's market square is dominated by a neo-Gothic town hall with a 72-metre tower – already the sixth on this spot since the town was founded. Its predecessor was destroyed in the great fire of 24 April 1858, and to pay for th…
Old towns & squares
Zamość
The Great Market Square in Zamość (pronounced roughly "ZAH-moshch") is the centerpiece of a Renaissance "ideal city" in eastern Poland and one of the most harmonious public squares in Central Europe. Laid out in the late 16th century as a…
Old towns & squares
Żary
The Market Square in Żary is the centre of the largest town in Polish Lusatia, which according to Statistics Poland (2021) has 36,004 inhabitants. In the middle of the square stands a free-standing town hall whose brick origins go back to…
Old towns & squares
Zielona Góra
The Old Market Square in Zielona Góra (say "zhe-LOH-nah GOO-rah") is the historic heart of the capital of Lubusz Province in western Poland: a pedestrian square around a Gothic town hall with a slightly leaning 54 m tower, framed by colorf…
Old towns & squares
Złotoryja
Legend has it that after the plague of 1553 only seven men survived in Złotoryja, and on Christmas Eve they met in the market square to sing hymns together. Ever since, a shared town Christmas Eve on the square has been a tradition, revive…
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,…
Old towns & squares
Frombork
Frombork's Market Square is laid out like a model of the Solar System: dark arcs in grey granite paving are the orbits, benches stand in for the planets, and Nicolaus Copernicus sits on the third one, Earth. The bronze figure looks towards…
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…
Monuments & mounds
Sobótka
On the slopes of Ślęża and in Sobótka stand granite statues that researchers link with the Celtic cultural sphere and usually date to the La Tène period, around 400–200 BC. The best known are the Bear on the summit and the Maiden with a Fi…
Technical monuments
Świdnica
On the main avenue of General Władysław Sikorski Park in Świdnica stands a red triplane that is hard to walk past. It is a replica of the Fokker Dr.I, the aircraft forever linked with Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron", who spent part…
Churches & monasteries
Rataje
Górka Klasztorna near Łobżenica is regarded as the oldest Marian sanctuary in Poland. According to tradition, in 1079 the Virgin Mary with the Child appeared here to a shepherd at a well in the Górka Grove. Today it is a complex with a bar…
Churches & monasteries
Zakopane
The Our Lady of Fatima Sanctuary at Krzeptówki (kshep-TOOF-kee) in Zakopane is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Tatra region and a church closely tied to Pope John Paul II. Local highlanders built it as a thank-offering af…