Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Wąchock
Grey and rusty-red sandstone blocks laid in horizontal bands — that is how you recognise the Cistercian abbey in Wąchock at first sight. The two-tone masonry is the work of Italian stonemasons who worked here around 1200. The complex is re…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Kraków
Most visitors in St Mary's Square look up at the towers of St Mary's Basilica — and walk straight past the smaller church on the other side of the square. Yet St Barbara's holds a stone Pietà from the late 14th century, a carved Garden of…
Hidden gemPalaces
Kamieniec Ząbkowicki
The Palace of Marianne of Orange in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki (say "kah-MYEN-yets zomb-ko-VEETS-kee") is a vast neo-Gothic castle-style palace in Lower Silesia, southwestern Poland, designed by the great Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schink…
Hidden gemCastles
Lidzbark Warmiński
The Castle of the Warmian Bishops in Lidzbark Warmiński (say "LEEDZ-bark var-MEEN-skee") is one of the best-preserved Gothic fortified residences in Poland and for more than four centuries the main seat of the prince-bishops of Warmia. The…
Hidden gemCastles
Żywiec
The Old Castle in Żywiec passed through the hands of the Skrzyński and Komorowski families, Queen Constance, the Wielopolskis and the Habsburgs — and each of them left a mark. The most valuable is the Renaissance arcaded courtyard, modelle…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Turzańsk
Five onion domes above a single long roof and a wooden bell tower on the same axis, said to be the tallest in the Polish Carpathians — this is the tserkva (Eastern-rite wooden church) of St Michael the Archangel in Turzańsk. Built in 1801–…
Hidden gemAmusement parks
Zator
133 rides and shows, 20 roller coasters and a coaster that, when it opened, was the tallest and fastest hyper coaster in Europe. Energylandia in Zator, opened on 14 July 2014, is the largest amusement park in Poland and welcomed around 2 m…
Hidden gemCaves
Trzebieszowice
In a side niche of Radochów Cave, researchers in the 1930s found a cave bear skull covered with a stone slab — and for years people wondered whether a Palaeolithic human had placed it there. This small karst cave in the Golden Mountains, a…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Tum
The Collegiate Church in Tum (say "toom") – the Archcollegiate Church of the Virgin Mary and St. Alexius near Łęczyca – is one of Poland's finest Romanesque buildings. With two apses, four towers and thick stone walls, it rises from the fi…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Chełmża
King John III Sobieski brought back the saddle cloth of Kara Mustafa's horse from the Battle of Vienna and gave it to this church, where, turned into a liturgical cope, it survives to this day. The Co-Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Chełm…
Hidden gemMuseums
Kołobrzeg
The Museum of Polish Arms in Kołobrzeg (pronounced roughly “koh-WOB-zhek”) is one of Poland's leading military history museums and one of the top things to do in this Baltic spa town. Its main branch in the town center combines a chronolog…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Henryków
"Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai" — "let me grind now, and you take a rest" — is what, according to the chronicle, the settler Boguchwał said to his wife as she worked the hand quern. Entered around 1270 in the Latin Book of Henryków, thi…
Hidden gemPalaces
Łomnica
A square, three-storey palace with two corner turrets stands where the roads to Karpniki and Wojanów split, about 5 km from Jelenia Góra. In the early 1990s it was a ruin; today it is one of the liveliest estates in the Valley of Palaces a…
Hidden gemPalaces
Warszawa
Wilanów Palace (Polish: Pałac w Wilanowie, roughly "vee-LAH-noof") is the Baroque summer residence of King John III Sobieski in southern Warsaw, often called the "Polish Versailles." Unlike much of the capital, which was rebuilt after Worl…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Hajnówka
A roof of irregular, interlocking concrete shells makes it look more like a sculpture than a traditional Orthodox church. The Holy Trinity Cathedral in Hajnówka holds about 5,000 worshippers, one of the largest Orthodox churches in Poland,…
Hidden gemCastles
Rabsztyn
Three Kraków councillors sat in this castle's dungeon until their city paid compensation for the killing of its lord. Rabsztyn Castle, whose name comes from the German Rabenstein, "Raven Rock", stands on a limestone hill (427.5 m above sea…
Hidden gemCastles
Rydzyna
Rydzyna Castle (say "rih-DZIH-nah"), officially the Royal Castle in Rydzyna, is the largest Baroque castle in the Greater Poland region, set in a small town about 10 km south of Leszno in western Poland. Once home to King Stanisław Leszczy…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Wadowice
On the south wall of the basilica is a sundial with the motto "Czas ucieka, wieczność czeka" — "Time flies, eternity awaits". According to the parish, it can be seen from the windows of the Wojtyła family's former flat. The Basilica of the…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Opatów
Forty-one figures weep at the news of the chancellor's death: King Sigismund the Old, a grand hetman, a bishop, courtiers, musicians — even greyhounds and falcons. This is the Opatów Lament, a Renaissance bronze relief and one of the fines…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Żywiec
According to the 18th-century chronicler Andrzej Komoniecki, the Renaissance tower of Żywiec's parish church was taller than the towers of St Mary's Basilica in Kraków. Today it stands 60 metres high, and since 2019 visitors can climb to i…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Prudnik
In 1735 Prudnik's new church was almost finished — the Blessed Sacrament was already kept there — when a fire in the town destroyed it along with the freshly painted frescoes by Felix Anton Scheffler. The builder Johann Innozenz Töpper reb…
Hidden gemChurches & monasteries
Łódź
The domed church with four corner turrets on the corner of Plac Wolności (Liberty Square) and Piotrkowska Street was for more than half a century the church of Łódź's Lutherans — Holy Trinity Church. Since 1945 it has served Catholics as t…
Hidden gemMuseums
Kraków
In Kraków's Kazimierz district, at ul. św. Wawrzyńca 15, stands a group of halls that since the late 19th century has housed horse-drawn trams, narrow-gauge electric trams and buses in turn. The museum calls it unique in Europe — an almost…
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…