Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Nature
Jaworki
The Homole Gorge (Polish: Wąwóz Homole, say "VON-voos ho-MO-leh") is a short, spectacular limestone ravine in the village of Jaworki near Szczawnica, in the Little Pieniny Mountains of southern Poland. In about 800 meters the Kamionka stre…
Nature
Kazimierz Dolny
Korzeniowy Dół (roughly "ko-zheh-NYOH-vih DOOW"), the "Root Gully", is the most famous loess ravine in Kazimierz Dolny, a small historic town on the Vistula River in eastern Poland. It is a sunken lane about 400 meters long, its walls lace…
Nature
Kościelisko
Kraków Gorge (Wąwóz Kraków, "VAH-voos KRAH-koof") is a narrow limestone ravine in Poland's Western Tatra Mountains, branching off the popular Kościeliska Valley near Zakopane. Its short, one-way yellow trail is a little adventure: an iron…
Nature
Jawor
In the rocks above the Jawornik stream you can see pillow lavas – the traces of undersea volcanic eruptions from the early Palaeozoic. About a kilometre from the village of Myślibórz, on Rataj hill, the basalt columns of the Małe Organy My…
Nature
Złotoryja
About 15.5 million years ago a volcano was active on the edge of today's Złotoryja. The cone is long gone, but its vent remains, and quarry walls have sliced through it like a knife. As a result, Wilcza Góra, also called Wilkołak, offers a…
Nature
Miasteczko Śląskie
In the woods near Żyglin, a district of Miasteczko Śląskie, a small scrap of an old dune has survived – a flattened patch measuring about 20 by 40 metres. The rest of the sand was dug out in the 20th century for the coal-mining industry, a…
Nature
Dźwirzyno
West of Kołobrzeg, between Dźwirzyno and Grzybowo, the beach shows a textbook cross-section of the Baltic coast in a small space: pale, shifting white dunes, then lower grey dunes covered in grassland, and beyond them pine forest on the du…
Nature
Opole
North of Opole, in the forests along the Stobrawa and Oder rivers, lie dunes you would hardly expect here: sandy hills up to 20 metres high, covered in pine forest. They are one of the most striking landscapes of the Stobrawa Landscape Par…
Nature
Bytom
Between the housing estates of Bytom, Chorzów and Piekary Śląskie lies a patchwork of ponds and reed beds that hosts an unusually large population of the little bittern, Poland's smallest heron. Żabie Doły ("Frog Hollows") grew out of subs…
Nature
gmina Pilica
The white walls of Zegarowe Skały (Clock Rocks) rise above the treetops on the left slope of the Wodąca Valley, between Smoleń, Złożeniec and Strzegowa. It is one of the most popular groups of climbing rocks in the Polish Jura, and also a…
Nature
gmina Żary
On the southern edge of Żary begins the hilly Green Forest, where three towers stand within a few square kilometres: the 19th-century Promnitz tower, the unfinished Bismarck tower and a steel fire lookout. The last of these stands on Gołęb…
Nature
Busko-Zdrój
On the north-eastern edge of Busko-Zdrój, by ul. Stawowa and right next to the village of Łagiewniki, the spa town's houses give way to the gypsum hills of Ponidzie. Zimne Wody ("Cold Waters") is a cluster of hills cut by small valleys, fi…
Nature
Ojców
The heart at the bottom of the basin is not a work of nature – it was carved into the stone, and the romantic name was given to the spring by local guides. The Spring of Love (Źródło Miłości) in the Prądnik Valley is a karst spring that de…
Nature
Pszczyna
Two bison from the forests of Pszczyna, the cow Planta and the bull Plebejer, were among the twelve animals from which the whole species was rebuilt after the First World War. The best place to learn their story is Jankowice near Pszczyna,…