Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Landmarks
Łeba
In a pine wood on the western bank of the Łeba river stands a lone fragment of brick wall. It is all that remains above ground of a medieval town – Old Łeba, destroyed by storms and buried by sand. Słowiński National Park calls the ruins o…
Landmarks
Busko-Zdrój
The opening of this building on 1 June 1836 is regarded as the birth of the spa town of Busko-Zdrój. The former Baths (Łazienki) were designed by Henryk Marconi (Enrico Marconi), a Warsaw architect of Italian origin, who modelled them on R…
Landmarks
Olsztyn
At the northern foot of the castle ruins in Olsztyn, near Częstochowa, stands a building that spent more than two centuries somewhere else entirely. This larch-wood granary from 1783 was built on a manor farm in Borowno, taken apart beam b…
Landmarks
Kazimierz Dolny
The granaries of Kazimierz Dolny (pronounced roughly “ka-ZHEE-myesh DOL-nee”) are a striking set of 16th- and 17th-century stone warehouses on the Vistula River, built when this small town was a busy grain port. The best known is the Kobia…
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…
Landmarks
Janów Podlaski
Janów Podlaski Stud (say "YAH-noof pod-LAH-skee") is Poland's oldest state horse stud, founded in 1817, and one of the world's most famous breeders of purebred Arabian horses. Its 19th-century stables by the architect Henryk Marconi, wide…
Landmarks
Wrocław
At the entrance to Stare Jatki from Odrzańska Street stands a group of bronze animals – a goose with an egg, a goat, a pig, a piglet, a duck, a rabbit and a giant rooster – and a plaque in the cobbles reads: "In honour of slaughtered anima…
Landmarks
Mstów
On a hill outside Mstów stand white stone walls without roofs, with a few barns still roofed among them – from a distance it looks like an abandoned village. This is the old barn quarter on Ściegna hill: a group of about thirty masonry bar…
Landmarks
Żarki
In the eastern part of Żarki, next to one of the largest markets in the region, stands a group of several dozen historic barns built of limestone and brick. They were put up after a fire in 1938 destroyed the earlier timber, thatched build…
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…
Landmarks
Barczewo
On ul. Kościuszki stands a pale Neoclassical building with large round-arched windows that looks more like a concert hall than a house of prayer. It is Barczewo's former synagogue, the only one surviving in the Olsztyn district. It was sav…
Landmarks
Klimontów
Four white Ionic columns, a triangular pediment and stairs climbing to the upper floor from both sides – the synagogue in Klimontów looks more like a Neoclassical country house than a house of prayer. It is one of the town's most distincti…
Landmarks
Łańcut
The Łańcut Synagogue (say "WAHN-tsoot") is an 18th-century Baroque synagogue on Sobieski Square, right next to the park of Łańcut Castle in southeastern Poland. Its plain exterior hides one of the finest surviving synagogue interiors in th…
Landmarks
Lesko
The Lesko Synagogue ("LESS-ko") is one of the finest surviving Jewish monuments in southeastern Poland and the most striking building in Lesko, the small town known as the gateway to the Bieszczady Mountains. Built of stone in the 17th cen…
Landmarks
Nowy Sącz
The walls of the Nowy Sącz synagogue are only 8 m high – a privilege of 1699 stipulated that it could not rise above the smallest church in town. The Baroque Town Synagogue (Synagoga Grodzka) of 1746 stands at the heart of the former Jewis…
Landmarks
Szczebrzeszyn
The pink building with a high mansard roof on ul. Sądowa was the main synagogue of Szczebrzeszyn's Jewish community. It was built in the early 17th century in the late Renaissance style, on the site of an even older synagogue. It survived…
Landmarks
Zamość
The Zamość Synagogue is one of the finest Renaissance synagogues in Poland and a powerful reminder of the Jewish community that helped shape this UNESCO-listed planned town in the Lublin region. Built in the early 17th century on the initi…
Landmarks
Czorsztyn
More than 1,500 km of routes and over 250 wooden monuments – Catholic and Orthodox churches, bell towers, manor houses, villas and open-air museums – make up the Wooden Architecture Route in the Małopolska region. Eight of them are UNESCO…
Landmarks
Goczałkowice-Zdrój
The oldest wooden church in Upper Silesia has its date written in its tree rings: dendrochronological research in 2011 dated St Martin's church in Ćwiklice to 1466. It is one of nearly a hundred monuments on the Wooden Architecture Route o…
Landmarks
Kraków
Of the roughly 12,000 manor houses that once stood within today's Poland, 2,800 survived — and according to the VisitMałopolska portal, 2,000 of those are wrecks beyond saving. The Lesser Poland Manor Houses Route (Szlak Dwory Małopolski)…
Landmarks
Wierzenica
The Trail of Wooden Churches around Zielonka Forest (Szlak kościołów drewnianych wokół Puszczy Zielonka) is a signposted driving route that links 12 wooden village churches just northeast of Poznań in western Poland. Built between the 16th…
Landmarks
Chrzanów
The Renaissance Route in Lesser Poland links 21 sites that show best how 16th-century Italy reshaped the region: royal castles, a humanist's suburban villa, fortified manor houses, a town hall and chapels. The route was prepared by the Kra…
Landmarks
Zakopane
The Zakopane Style Trail is a town route linking 41 historic buildings in Zakopane, built in the style that Stanisław Witkiewicz created around 1900 as a model for a Polish national architecture. It was opened in July 2014 on the initiativ…
Landmarks
Sandomierz
The Needle's Eye (Ucho Igielne), also called the Dominican Gate, is a narrow passage through Sandomierz's old defensive walls, leading west from the Old Town towards the Dominican friary at St James's Church. It is the only surviving wicke…