Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Museums
Istebna
A highlander from Istebna who studied in Kraków under Mehoffer and Fałat and later in Paris won a bronze medal at an exhibition in Paris in 1937, then spent the last decades of his life working in near obscurity. Jan Wałach (1884–1979), a…
Museums
Lubomierz
Almost everyone in Poland knows the comedy Sami swoi ("All Friends Here"), shot by Sylwester Chęciński in Lubomierz in 1967. It tells of the feud between two neighbours, Kargul and Pawlak, peasants resettled from the east to Lower Silesia…
Museums
Jelenia Góra
The Karkonosze Museum holds more than 9,000 pieces of art glass – from Baroque goblets made in local mountain glassworks to an iridescent plate by Louis Tiffany. The building at Matejki Street 28 was built for the museum in 1912–1914, and…
Museums
Łódź
The Film Museum in Łódź (say "WOODGE") is the only museum in Poland dedicated to the technology, art and culture of cinema. It occupies the 19th-century palace of textile magnate Karol Scheibler, on the edge of the Księży Młyn industrial e…
Museums
Kraków
The Czartoryski Museum in Kraków (say "char-to-RIS-kee") is the branch of the National Museum in Kraków that holds Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine – one of only a handful of Leonardo portraits in the world. Set in a cluster of hist…
Museums
Kolbuszowa
The Museum of Folk Culture in Kolbuszowa, and above all its Ethnographic Park, is one of the largest open-air museums in southeastern Poland. On almost 30 hectares beside the small Nil River stand more than 80 wooden buildings: thatched co…
Museums
Osiek nad Notecią
The Museum of Folk Culture in Osiek nad Notecią (OH-shek nad no-TEH-chohn) is a peaceful open-air museum of village life in northern Wielkopolska (Greater Poland). Spread over 13 hectares (32 acres), it brings together 28 historic building…
Museums
Gołuchów
The idea of a museum devoted to forests was announced by the Galician Forestry Society as early as 1894, at the General National Exhibition in Lviv, but it took almost a century to open one. The Forestry Museum in Gołuchów was officially o…
Museums
Kraków
The Polish Aviation Museum in Kraków (Muzeum Lotnictwa Polskiego) is one of Europe's largest aviation museums and a must for anyone who loves aircraft. It occupies the historic Rakowice-Czyżyny airfield (roughly "ra-ko-VEE-tseh chi-ZHI-ni"…
Museums
Żarnowiec
In this manor house near Krosno, Maria Konopnicka wrote, among other works, "Rota" – a patriotic song that generations of Poles still know by heart. She received the house and its park in 1903 as a gift from the nation to mark 25 years of…
Museums
Gdynia
The Naval Museum in Gdynia (Muzeum Marynarki Wojennej) is Poland's main museum of naval history, set on the seaside boulevard opposite the city beach. Inside a modern building you'll find a multimedia exhibition on a century of the Polish…
Museums
Gdynia
The Gdynia City Museum is a municipal museum on the seaside boulevard that tells the story of one of Poland's youngest and most unusual cities – from a Kashubian fishing village to a booming interwar port, through World War II and the anti…
Museums
Jaworzno
The first hard-coal mine on Polish soil opened in the 1760s in Szczakowa, today a district of Jaworzno. The Jaworzno City Museum tells that story in a building that once belonged to a colliery, and alongside mining it covers a subject the…
Museums
Kołobrzeg
The Kołobrzeg City Museum occupies the elegant Braunschweig Palace on Armii Krajowej Street, steps from St. Mary's Basilica and the town hall. If you want to understand how this Baltic resort came to be – from an early medieval stronghold,…
Museums
Legnica
Above the entrance to the Baroque palace at ul. Partyzantów 3 you can see the letters LAL – short for "Lodovicus Abbas Lubensis", Abbot Ludwig Bauch of Lubiąż. For more than sixty years this building from 1728 has housed Poland's only muse…
Museums
Frombork
The Nicolaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork is a regional museum, founded in 1948, devoted to the astronomer who lived in this small town on the Vistula Lagoon for nearly three decades. It is not a single building but a group of sites: the…
Museums
Szklarska Poręba
In front of the wooden villa on Kilińskiego Street lie petrified tree trunks from the Carboniferous period, and inside you will find a piece of the Gibeon meteorite and stromatolites around 570 million years old. The Mineralogical Museum i…
Museums
Bydgoszcz
The Museum of Soap and History of Dirt (Muzeum Mydła i Historii Brudu) in Bydgoszcz is one of Poland's quirkiest museums and a genuinely fun stop in the city's compact Old Town. Instead of glass cases, you get a hands-on workshop where you…
Museums
Katowice
Until the 1980s, women from Nikiszowiec carried baskets of bed linen here, scrubbed it on washboards in masonry troughs and ran it through an electric mangle. Today the old laundry at Rymarska 4 houses the City Ethnology Department of the…
Museums
Kazimierz Dolny
The Vistula River Museum in Kazimierz Dolny (Muzeum Nadwiślańskie) is a regional museum spread across several branches that cover the art, history and nature of the middle Vistula valley in eastern Poland. In town you can choose between Po…
Museums
Kraków
At 17 Kanonicza Street, on the way from the Main Square to Wawel, a red facade hides one of the finest collections of medieval art in Poland. In the Bishop Erazm Ciołek Palace, the National Museum in Kraków displays the Krużlowa Madonna, w…
Museums
Gdańsk
The National Museum in Gdańsk – Department of Early Art is the city's most important art museum, housed in a late-Gothic Franciscan monastery on Toruńska Street, a few minutes' walk from the Main Town. It is famous as the home of Hans Meml…
Museums
Kraków
The National Museum in Kraków – Main Building (Polish: Gmach Główny, roughly "gmakh GWOV-ny") is the largest exhibition venue of Poland's oldest national museum, standing on 3 Maja Avenue just west of Kraków's Old Town, opposite the vast B…
Museums
Poznań
The National Museum in Poznań is one of Poland's leading art museums, and its main building on Plac Wolności houses the Gallery of Painting and Sculpture. It is the place to see Polish painting from Matejko to Malczewski, 20th-century art,…