Warsaw travel guide

Top 10 sights in Warsaw

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Adrian Grycuk · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Palace of Culture and Science

   Two hundred and thirty-seven metres of Stalinist wedding cake, built between 1952 and 1955 as a gift from the Soviet Union that Poland could not refuse. It was the tallest building in the country until 2021, and Varsovians have proposed demolishing, ignoring and finally listing it.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© Marcin Białek · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Royal Castle in Warsaw

   The residence of Polish monarchs, deliberately burnt and then blown up by German engineers in 1944. Rebuilding began only in 1971 and was paid for largely by public subscription, using fragments dug out of the rubble and hidden in cellars.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© Kapitel · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Warsaw Old Town

   Some eighty-five per cent destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt between 1949 and 1963 from pre-war surveys and from Bellotto's eighteenth-century paintings of the streets. UNESCO listed it in 1980 specifically as an example of near-total reconstruction, which was controversial at the time.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4© Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie · CC BY-SA 4.0

   National Museum in Warsaw

   One of Poland's largest museums, holding eleven thousand ancient objects and the country's biggest Chinese collection. Its extraordinary room is the Faras gallery — Nubian wall paintings that Polish archaeologists cut from a cathedral in Sudan before the Aswan reservoir drowned it.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5© Adrian Grycuk · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   St. John's Archcathedral

   The cathedral of Warsaw, fourteenth century in origin, which the Germans destroyed in 1944 by driving a tracked demolition charge into the nave during the Uprising. A piece of that machine's track is set into the outer wall of the rebuilt church.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© Toniklemm · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Grand Theatre

   The opera house of 1833 on Theatre Square, with one of the largest stages in Europe. It was gutted in 1939 and rebuilt by 1965; the facade is original and the auditorium behind it is not, which is true of most things in this city.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7© Wojciech Kryński · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Museum of the History of Polish Jews

   A museum opened in 2013 on the ground of the former ghetto, opposite the monument to its fighters. Its subject is deliberately the thousand years of Jewish life in Poland rather than only its destruction — eight galleries, of which the Holocaust is one.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© Adrian Grycuk · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Sigismund's Column

   A column of 1644 to Sigismund III, who moved the capital here from Kraków in 1596, and the first secular monument in column form put up in modern Europe. The Germans toppled it in 1944; the statue survived and was re-erected in 1949.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9© Fred Romero from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0

   Łazienki Park

   Seventy-six hectares laid out for Stanisław August, the last king of Poland, and now the city's chief park. Chopin recitals are given free under his monument on summer Sundays, and the peacocks have the run of the place.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10© Fred Romero from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0

    Łazienki Palace

    The king's classicist villa built out into a lake, so that the water comes up to the walls on two sides. Stanisław August held his Thursday dinners here for the writers and painters of the Polish Enlightenment, which is how the palace is still described.

    TiqetsKlook

Popular tickets & tours in Warsaw

Live products and prices are provided directly by Klook.

Trending now

Based on 2025 Wikipedia pageviews — popular places beyond the top 10.

1. 

   1© Rhododendrites · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Presidential Palace

   The president's official residence, and the building where the Warsaw Pact was signed in 1955 and where the round-table talks that dismantled communism were held in 1989. The same room served both, which nobody planned.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© Mkos · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Belweder

   A neoclassical palace remodelled in 1818 for the Russian viceroy, and later a presidential residence. It stands at the edge of the Łazienki park and is used now for official meetings rather than living.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© Adrian Grycuk · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Monument to the Ghetto Heroes

   A monument of 1948 to the Ghetto Uprising, carved in labradorite that Germany had ordered from Sweden for its own victory monuments. Willy Brandt knelt in front of it unannounced in December 1970, which changed German-Polish relations more than the treaty he had come to sign.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4

   Saxon Palace

   A palace destroyed in 1944 of which only three arcades were left standing, and those were kept as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Whether to rebuild the rest has been argued in Poland for eighty years; work finally began in the 2020s.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5© Adrian Grycuk · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Holy Cross Church

   A baroque church on Krakowskie Przedmieście holding Chopin's heart, which his sister brought back from Paris in a jar of alcohol and which is sealed in a pillar of the nave. The Germans removed it for safekeeping in 1944 and returned it in 1945.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© Alina Zienowicz Ala z · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Warsaw Zoo

   Zoo in Warsaw opened in 1928. Its director Jan Żabiński and his wife hid about three hundred Jews in the empty animal houses and their villa during the German occupation.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7© Adrian Grycuk · CC BY 3.0 pl

   Warsaw Uprising Museum

   A museum opened in 2004, sixty years after the Uprising, in a former tram power station. Sixty-three days of fighting, two hundred thousand dead and the deliberate razing of the city afterwards are set out in a building deliberately full of noise.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© Adrian Grycuk · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

   Warsaw Uprising Monument

   A bronze group of 1989 showing insurgents emerging from a manhole into the ruins — the sewers were how the uprising moved between districts. It was the first monument to the 1944 rising that the communist state permitted, forty-five years after the event.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9© Rhododendrites · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Castle Square

   The square in front of the Royal Castle, closed on one side by Sigismund's column and opening onto the Old Town. It was a field of rubble in 1945 and is now the busiest meeting point in the city.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10© Adrian Grycuk · CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

    Powązki Cemetery

    A cemetery laid out in 1790 and effectively the Polish pantheon — writers, composers, actors, insurgents and the priest murdered by the secret police in 1984 are all buried in it. The Avenue of the Distinguished runs through the middle.

    TiqetsKlook