Coverage / Poland
Poland
Eastern Europe
A large Central European country on the Baltic, built around the granite Tatra Mountains in the south, the primeval Bialowieza Forest and its wild bison in the east, the Great Masurian Lakes in the north, and historic cities Krakow, Gdansk and Warsaw with a deep calendar of memory sites, film and music festivals.
11 activities · 13 pairings · 23 verified providers
What you can do in Poland
Museums & Galleries
- Gdanskyear-roundGdansk carries the weight of the twentieth century, and two great museums make it legible. The European Solidarity Centre, beside the shipyard gate where Lech Walesa and the Solidarity trade union broke the communist grip in 1980, tells the story of the movement that helped end the Cold War, its exhibition built around the wooden board bearing the strikers' 21 Demands, a UNESCO Memory of the World document. A short walk away, the Museum of the Second World War sets the whole conflict out across a vast underground exhibition on the ground where the war's first shots were fired in 1939. Between them you get the century's darkest war and one of its most hopeful revolutions in a single walkable city.
- Krakowyear-roundKrakow holds the crown jewels of Polish art and one of Europe's rare surviving medieval centres. In the Princes Czartoryski Museum, a branch of the National Museum, hangs Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, the only Leonardo painting in Poland, alongside a Rembrandt landscape. Under the Main Market Square, the Rynek Underground museum sets you among the excavated foundations of the medieval trading town. The National Museum spreads Polish painting, arms and decorative arts across a dozen branches, and the Wawel Royal Castle crowns the whole. It is a compact, walkable city where a day moves easily from a Renaissance masterpiece to a subterranean archaeology dig without a bus.
- Wieliczkayear-roundThe Wieliczka Salt Mine is an underground world carved from rock salt over seven centuries of mining, and one of the very first sites UNESCO ever listed, in 1978. The Tourist Route drops you 135 metres down through a 3.5-kilometre sequence of chambers, timbered galleries and green brine lakes, past sculptures, an underground lake with a Chopin light show, and the astonishing St Kinga's Chapel, a full church a hundred metres down with chandeliers, altarpieces and floor tiles all cut from salt. Woven into the route, the Cracow Saltworks Museum displays the mining machines, tools and salt art that tell how the mine worked. It is a Museums-and-Galleries visit like no other, a heritage attraction and a genuine museum set deep beneath the ground.
Best months at a glance
| J | F | M | A | M | J | J | A | S | O | N | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Culinary | ||||||||||||
| Film Festivals | ||||||||||||
| Kitesurfing | ||||||||||||
| Museums | ||||||||||||
| Music Festivals | ||||||||||||
| Rock Climbing | ||||||||||||
| Sailing | ||||||||||||
| Skiing | ||||||||||||
| Trekking | ||||||||||||
| Wildlife Safaris | ||||||||||||
| Witness / Attend |