Kraków travel guide

Top 10 sights in Kraków

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© C messier · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Wieliczka Salt Mine

   A salt mine worked from the thirteenth century until 2007, with about three hundred kilometres of galleries on nine levels. Miners carved chapels underground as they went, the largest of them St Kinga's, with altars, chandeliers and statues all cut from rock salt; it was on the first World Heritage list in 1978.

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2. 

   2© Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Wawel Cathedral

   Cathedral on Wawel hill in Kraków, consecrated in 1364. Polish kings were crowned and buried here for four centuries, and the crypt holds Kościuszko and Piłsudski.

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3. 

   3© Pawelsuder · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Wawel

   The limestone hill above the Vistula that has been the centre of Polish power since the tenth century, carrying the castle and the cathedral. A cave at its foot is shown as the den of the dragon the legendary Krak killed, and a bronze dragon outside it breathes fire on a coin.

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4. 

   4© Pgkos · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków

   A brick Gothic church finished in 1397 whose two towers are deliberately unequal. Veit Stoss carved its limewood altarpiece between 1477 and 1489 — thirteen metres high, the largest Gothic altarpiece in the world — and a trumpeter plays the hour from the taller tower, cutting the last note off short.

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5. 

   5© Stanislau 93 · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Wawel Castle

   The royal castle on Wawel hill, rebuilt in the 1500s around an arcaded Renaissance courtyard by Italian architects the king brought north. Its treasury holds the coronation sword, and its walls carry the arras tapestries the Nazis looted and Canada returned in 1961.

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6. 

   6© Chris Olszewski · CC BY-SA 4.0

   National Museum in Kraków

   Poland's largest museum, founded in 1879 with a single donated painting and now holding seven hundred and eighty thousand objects across eleven galleries. Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine is shown in its main building.

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7. 

   7© Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Old town Market Square in Krakow

   Laid out in 1257 and, at two hundred metres square, one of the largest medieval squares in Europe. The Cloth Hall stands in the middle of it, St Mary's on one corner, and the whole thing has never been built over — the tenements around it are still the original plots.

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8. 

   8© Zygmunt Put · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Czartoryski Museum

   A museum founded in 1796 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska and one of the oldest in Poland, built around Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine and Rembrandt's Good Samaritan. Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man was taken by the Germans in 1939 and has never been found; its empty frame is shown.

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   Kraków Ghetto

   The ghetto the Germans created in Podgórze in March 1941, into which some fifteen thousand people were forced. It was liquidated in March 1943, the survivors sent to Płaszów, and its wall was built with tops shaped like Jewish headstones — two fragments still stand.

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10. 

    10

    Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp

    A concentration camp built in 1942 on top of two Jewish cemeteries, with its commandant's villa overlooking the ground. Eight thousand or more people died in it. The site was levelled after the war and is now open grass, which is itself the difficulty with commemorating it.

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1. 

   1© Jorge Lascar · CC BY 2.0

   Sukiennice

   The Cloth Hall in the middle of the market square, a medieval trading arcade rebuilt in Renaissance form in 1555 with a parapet of grotesque masks. Souvenir stalls fill the ground floor; upstairs is the nineteenth-century Polish painting gallery, which is much better than the shopping.

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2. 

   2© marek7400 · CC BY 3.0

   Divine Mercy Sanctuary

   A basilica at Łagiewniki in Kraków dedicated to the Divine Mercy, where Saint Faustina Kowalska is buried. The present building was raised between 1999 and 2002.

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3. 

   3© Jeremiah Z. Cockroach · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Kraków Barbican

   A round brick outwork of 1498 with seven turrets and walls three metres thick, built as the outer defence of the main gate. It is the best-preserved barbican in Europe and one of only three left anywhere.

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4. 

   4© Pawelsuder · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Polish Aviation Museum

   An aviation museum on one of the oldest airfields in Europe, holding over two hundred aircraft. Its unmatched part is a group of pre-1918 machines that came from the German aviation collection and were left in Poland at the end of the war.

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5. 

   5© Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Florian's Gate

   The only surviving one of eight medieval gates, built about 1307, and the start of the Royal Route that kings took to Wawel for coronation. Local painters have hung their canvases on the wall beside it for over a century.

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6. 

   6© Marco Almbauer · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Old Synagogue in Kraków

   A fortified synagogue on Szeroka Street in the Kazimierz quarter, designed by Matteo Gucci in a mixture of Gothic and mannerist forms. Its completion is placed somewhere between 1407 and 1570, and it is the oldest synagogue building surviving in Poland.

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7. 

   7© Igor123121 · CC BY 4.0

   Church of St. Francis of Assisi

   A Franciscan church of the 13th century on All Saints Square, across from the Bishop's Palace where John Paul II lodged on his visits to the city. Stanislaw Wyspianski filled it with Art Nouveau glass around 1900, the great Let There Be Light window above the door among them.

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8. 

   8© Aneta Pawska · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Ojców National Park

   The smallest national park in Poland, in a limestone gorge north of Kraków, with caves, a rock pinnacle called Hercules' Club and the Renaissance castle of Pieskowa Skała on a crag. Chopin visited in 1829 and the valley has been a summer escape since.

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9. 

   9© Jeremiah Z. Cockroach · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Andrew's Church

   A Romanesque fortress church on Grodzka Street, built between 1079 and 1098 and the only church in Krakow to hold out against the Mongol raid of 1241 — the slits low in its wall were defensive windows. The Poor Clares have held it since 1320, and Baltazar Fontana gave it baroque interiors.

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10. 

    10© Zygmunt Put Zetpe0202 · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Planty Park

    A ring of park four kilometres round, laid out from 1822 on the ground cleared when the medieval walls were pulled down. It encircles the whole Old Town, so any walk into the centre from any direction goes through it.

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