Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
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Karpacz
The Kopa chairlift in Karpacz, known locally as "Zbyszek," is the easiest way to get from town up into the high Karkonosze, the Polish side of the Giant Mountains. In about eight minutes it lifts you to just below the summit of Kopa (1,377…
Technical monuments
Bielsko-Biała
Yellow glass-sided gondolas gliding over the forest from the Olszówka district have been a familiar sight in Bielsko-Biała for generations. The Szyndzielnia cable car opened on 21 December 1953 as Poland's first gondola lift and the first…
Technical monuments
Rogów
The heritage train from Rogów never goes faster than 40 km/h, and many of its wagons still carry the names of the sugar factories they came from. The Rogów – Rawa – Biała narrow-gauge railway is the only heritage narrow-gauge line in Łódź…
Technical monuments
Poznań
For many Poznań residents, the narrow-gauge train along Lake Malta is a first childhood memory – and its story is older than the lake's leisure park itself. Maltanka started in 1956 as a children's railway in the Dębina district and moved…
Museums
Gliwice
Kolejkowo Gliwice (roughly "ko-lay-KO-vo") is a huge model railway and miniature world inside the Europa Centralna shopping mall in Gliwice, in Poland's Upper Silesia region. Trains wind past tiny versions of real Silesian landmarks, thous…
Other
Wrocław
Kolejkowo in Wrocław (roughly koh-ley-KOH-voh, from the Polish word for model railway) is one of Poland's largest model railway layouts: a miniature Wrocław and Lower Silesia built at 1:25 scale, with moving trains, cars and thousands of t…
Museums
Kołobrzeg
The Kołobrzeg Maritime Open-Air Museum (Kołobrzeski Skansen Morski) is an outdoor branch of the Museum of Polish Arms in the town's fishing port. Its stars are two Polish Navy warships standing on dry land that you can climb aboard, along…
Nature
Łęknica
The colourful lakes of the Muskau Arch are best explored on the "Former Babina Mine" geotourism trail between Nowe Czaple and Łęknica. These are not natural lakes but flooded pits and subsidence hollows left by a lignite mine that operated…
Museums
Miasteczko Śląskie
At around 2 p.m. on 17 June 1917, a roar echoed through the Bibiela mine and a torrent of water burst into the workings. The miners managed to escape, but within two hours the entire mine – machinery and equipment included – was under wate…
Nature
Gruszków
The Colorful Lakes (Kolorowe Jeziorka, say "ko-lo-RO-veh yeh-ZHOR-ka") in the Rudawy Janowickie mountains are four small ponds filling old pyrite mine pits above the village of Wieściszowice in Lower Silesia, southwestern Poland. Each has…
Other
Ruda Sułowska
The Colourful Carp Trail winds through the Barycz Valley, on the border of Lower Silesia and Greater Poland – a region famous for its 800-year tradition of carp farming. The route is marked by 30 three-dimensional carp figures painted by a…
Historic sites
Świdnica
On 12 November 1989, in the farmyard at Krzyżowa, Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl exchanged the sign of peace during the Mass of Reconciliation. The gesture symbolically closed the darkest chapter…
Fortifications
Walim
In 1944 the construction sites in the Owl Mountains were allocated 28,000 tonnes of steel and cement – as much as the Third Reich set aside each year for air-raid shelters for its entire civilian population. Riese (German for "giant") was…
Fortifications
Walim
The Włodarz Complex (roughly "VWOH-dahsh") in Poland's Owl Mountains is one of three publicly accessible sections of Project Riese ("Giant"), Nazi Germany's vast and still mysterious underground construction program of 1943–1945. It is the…
Churches & monasteries
Zielona Góra
The Co-Cathedral of St Hedwig of Silesia at ul. Mickiewicza 14 is the oldest surviving historic building in Zielona Góra. The brick Gothic hall church has survived fires, the Reformation and the collapse of its tower, and its present silho…
Technical monuments
Kowary
The Podgórze Uranium Mine (pod-GOO-zheh) in Kowary is a former uranium mine in Poland's Giant Mountains where ore really was extracted in the 1950s — and where you now explore the tunnels by the light of miners' lamps. Highlights include a…
Technical monuments
gmina Stronie Śląskie
The Kletno Uranium Mine (say "KLET-no") is an underground tourist route in a former adit on the slopes of the Śnieżnik Massif in the Sudetes, southwest Poland. Between 1948 and 1953, under Soviet supervision, uranium ore was mined here for…
Technical monuments
Złotoryja
Złotoryja takes its name from gold, panned here as early as the Middle Ages, and its 13th-century Latin name was Mons Aurum, Gold Hill. The Aurelia mine lets you go underground on the slope of St Nicholas Hill and see what the local hunt f…
Monuments & mounds
Kraków
In Kraków, people have been raising earth mounds for over a thousand years – from mysterious tumuli linked to the legendary founder Krak and his daughter Wanda to memorials to Kościuszko, Piłsudski and Pope John Paul II. Together the five…
Monuments & mounds
Przemyśl
On Zniesienie hill, which rises above Przemyśl to the south, stands a man-made mound that legend says holds the grave of a Tatar khan. Historians date it to the late 9th century and link it with the presence of the Magyars, and from its to…
Monuments & mounds
Piekary Śląskie
The Liberation Mound is the highest point of Piekary Śląskie and one of the key monuments of interwar Upper Silesia. It was raised over five years, in 1932–1937, to mark the 250th anniversary of King John III Sobieski's march to Vienna and…
Mountains & peaks
Brzegi
Twenty-eight summits, from Łysica in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains (614 m) to Rysy in the Tatras (2,499 m), adding up to more than 30,000 metres of ascent on your own legs. The Crown of Polish Mountains (Korona Gór Polski) is not a single t…
Museums
Stary Wiśnicz
In a wooden manor at the foot of Wiśnicz Castle, Jan Matejko spent his engagement, took holidays with his family and drew a little town whose wooden houses no one will ever see again. Decades later, during the Second World War, the same ho…
Churches & monasteries
Wałbrzych
The Guardian Angels Church in Wałbrzych (say "VAHW-bzhikh"), formally the Collegiate Church of Our Lady of Sorrows and the Holy Guardian Angels, is the main Catholic church of this former coal-mining city in Lower Silesia, southwest Poland…