Visit Poland
Walk through Kraków’s medieval centre in the morning, eat pierogi in a cellar restaurant, then board a train for somewhere that feels completely different. Poland rewards travelling around rather than treating it as a single-city break. Warsaw mixes painstakingly reconstructed historic streets with a modern capital built around them; Gdańsk brings the Baltic, maritime history and tall merchant houses; farther south, the landscape rises sharply into the Tatra Mountains. The distances are manageable enough to combine several sides of the country in one trip. History is difficult to separate from travelling here. Kraków escaped much of the physical destruction suffered by Warsaw during the Second World War, while Warsaw’s historic centre was reconstructed after being devastated in 1944 and is now itself a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Poland also contains Auschwitz-Birkenau, preserved as a place of remembrance of Nazi Germany’s concentration and extermination system, alongside sites from very different periods such as the medieval Wieliczka salt mine and Malbork Castle. These places deserve time and context rather than being treated as boxes to tick between more conventional sightseeing. For a first trip, give yourself at least a long weekend for one city or around a week if you want to combine Kraków, Warsaw and another region. Rail makes multi-city travel practical, while adding the Tatras, Baltic coast or Masurian lakes gives the trip a very different character from a purely urban itinerary. Poland works across the year, although what you do will change with the season: warmer months suit city wandering, lakes and hiking, while winter brings snow to the mountains and Christmas markets to many cities. Add Poland to your list and explore enough of it to discover which version of the country stays with you.