Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Churches & monasteries
Zakopane
Drive into Zakopane from the Olcza side and you will see a church whose roof is made up of five segments of unequal height. From the side they look like hands joined in prayer, and at the same time like steep highland roofs and Tatra peaks…
Churches & monasteries
Piaski
A copy of Venice's Santa Maria della Salute rises above the fields of Greater Poland near Gostyń. Its dome is 17 m wide and 50 m high, and it is regarded as the largest dome in Poland. Strictly speaking, the basilica and the Oratorian mona…
Churches & monasteries
Pacanów
Pacanów is best known for the cartoon goat Koziołek Matołek, but the little town also has one of the oldest church pedigrees in Poland. The Basilica of St Martin – also the Sanctuary of the Dying Lord Jesus – stands on the site of a church…
Churches & monasteries
Przyrów
On the traditional pilgrim route to Jasna Góra, about 35 km east of Częstochowa, a late Gothic wooden figure of St Anne with the Virgin and Child has been venerated for more than five hundred years. Around it grew a Baroque monastery compl…
Churches & monasteries
Dukla
The Shrine of St. John of Dukla (DOOK-lah) is a baroque Bernardine church and monastery in the small town of Dukla, in the Carpathian foothills of southeast Poland. It is the main place of devotion to St. John of Dukla, a medieval friar ca…
Churches & monasteries
Kalisz
On 29 April 1945, Polish priests imprisoned in Dachau expected to be executed – instead, they lived to see liberation. Believing they owed their survival to St Joseph, more than 300 priests came to his image in Kalisz on a pilgrimage of th…
Churches & monasteries
Brzesko
Szczepanów, a village a few kilometres from Brzesko, is by tradition the birthplace of St Stanislaus of Szczepanów, Bishop of Kraków and patron saint of Poland. The brick neo-Gothic basilica with its tall tower encloses a Gothic church fro…
Churches & monasteries
Bardo
On the high altar of the Baroque basilica in Bardo stands a figure that is easy to miss: it is just 43 cm tall. This is the Romanesque Enthroned Madonna from the 12th century, regarded as the oldest wooden sculpture in Lower Silesia and a…
Churches & monasteries
Czerna
Above the church portal in Czerna is a Latin inscription praising blessed solitude, and it sums up the place well. For almost two centuries the Discalced Carmelite monastery in the Eliaszówka Valley was a hermitage closed to lay people. To…
Churches & monasteries
Pruchnik
According to tradition, in 1680 a poor widow carried her child, bitten by an adder, up the hill, washed him with water from the spring below an image of the Virgin hanging on a tree – and the boy recovered. That story marked the beginning…
Churches & monasteries
Koziegłowy
The image of St Anthony in Koziegłówki was painted in Rome and blessed by Pope Pius V in 1568. It reached this village in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland in the 17th century and now hangs in a church that looks more like an Italian basilica…
Fortifications
Węgierska Górka
The concrete walls of this bunker still bear the marks of shells from September 1939. "Wędrowiec" was the heart of the defence of Węgierska Górka: Captain Tadeusz Semik commanded from here, and the crew surrendered only after three days of…
Mountains & peaks
Brenna
On the ridge of Grabowa, archaeologists have found traces of Middle Palaeolithic early humans, probably of the Mousterian culture. Today, right next to the summit of this mountain (907 m), stands Chata Grabowa — a lodge in highland style,…
Viewpoints
Wrocław
The Sky Tower Observation Deck in Wrocław (VROTS-wahv) sits on the 49th floor, about 200 m above the city, in the tallest building in Lower Silesia. From the top you can take in the whole of Wrocław: the Oder River and its islands, the spi…
Museums
Katowice
In the Brynów district of Katowice stands the red-brick former clothing store of the Wujek coal mine. On 16 December 1981, three days after martial law was declared in communist Poland, a special riot-police (ZOMO) platoon fired on strikin…
Museums
Jarocin
The Polish Rock Granary is a museum where loudspeakers replace silence. Spread over two floors of a former grain store in the centre of Jarocin, it tells the story of Polish rock music from the 1950s to the present day, built around the fe…
Landmarks
Bydgoszcz
The Granaries on the Brda River (Spichrze nad Brdą) are the classic postcard view of Bydgoszcz (say "BID-gosh-ch"): three half-timbered grain warehouses with steep red roofs, standing right at the water's edge on Grodzka Street. They recal…
Museums
Pszczyna
The ducal horses of Pszczyna lived in a Gothic Revival hall with rib vaults resting on cast-iron columns, each in one of 36 stalls – the interior looks more like a church than a stable block. The Ducal Stables on ul. Basztowa, a few steps…
Museums
Milówka
The Old Cottage (Stara Chałupa) at 1 Piastowska Street in Milówka is a timber house built in 1739, one of the oldest surviving examples of folk architecture in the Żywiec region. Today it houses a small museum run by the municipal cultural…
Technical monuments
Poznań
Stary Browar ("STAH-ri BRO-var," the Old Brewery) in Poznań is a shopping, arts and business center at Półwiejska 42, built inside the red-brick halls of the 19th-century Hugger brewery. Its "50:50" concept, half business and half art, tur…
Churches & monasteries
Zakopane
The Old Church in Zakopane (Stary Kościół, pronounced roughly "STAH-ri KOSH-choow"), officially the Church of Our Lady of Częstochowa, is the oldest parish church in Poland's best-known mountain resort. This small wooden church on Kościeli…
Museums
gmina Niegowa
The Old Mill – Museum of Old Crafts (Stary Młyn) in Żarki ("ZHAR-kee") is a hands-on museum set in a nearly century-old electric mill in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, a limestone region of southern Poland known for its ruined castles. Ins…
Thermal baths & water parks
Wręcza
Suntago Park of Poland in Wręcza (VREN-chah), near the town of Mszczonów, is Poland's largest indoor water park and one of the biggest in Europe, about 50–60 km (35 miles) southwest of Warsaw. Hundreds of real palm trees grow under a vast…
Landmarks
Puławy
The Temple of the Sibyl in Puławy (say "poo-WAH-vih") is a circular neoclassical temple perched above an old arm of the Vistula River in the park of the Czartoryski Palace — and the birthplace of Poland's first museum. Built in 1798–1801 t…