10 Top Places to Visit in Krakow

Wawel Hill has been the symbolic centre of Poland since the 11th century, when Polish kings moved their seat here from Gniezno. The complex layered onto the limestone outcrop combines the Renaissance Royal Castle, the Gothic Wawel Cathedral, the Romanesque Rotunda of Saints Felix and Adauctus, and the Dragon's Den cave at the foot of the cliff. Almost every Polish monarch was crowned and buried in the cathedral, and the cathedral crypts hold national heroes from Tadeusz Kościuszko to Marshal Józef Piłsudski.

The hill itself is free to enter, but the main interior attractions are individually ticketed. The State Rooms and Royal Private Apartments are the most popular and tickets sell out by mid-morning in summer; the Crown Treasury and Armoury, the Lost Wawel archaeological exhibition, and the Sigismund Bell tower climb each need their own ticket. Plan on at least three hours if you want to see more than the courtyard and cathedral.

Don't miss the Sigismund Chapel - the gold-domed Renaissance jewel on the south side of the cathedral - or the climb up the bell tower for the closest look at Poland's largest historical bell, described by UNESCO as part of the Old Town's outstanding universal value.

Krakow's St Mary's Basilica (Bazylika Mariacka) is the brick Gothic landmark on the northeast corner of the Main Market Square, and its mismatched twin towers are the visual signature of the city. Construction began in 1290; the taller north tower (81 metres) doubled as the city's main watchtower, while the shorter south tower (69 metres) carries five bells including the 8-tonne Półzygmunt.

Inside, the basilica is best known for the Veit Stoss altarpiece - a 13-metre-high carved limewood polyptych completed in 1489 and the largest Gothic altarpiece in the world. The central scene depicts the Dormition of the Virgin, surrounded by panels of the Joys of Mary; the figures are so detailed that art historians have used them to study 15th-century Polish faces and costumes. The starry blue vaulted ceiling, painted by Jan Matejko in 1890, is also unmissable.

Above all this, the basilica is famous for the hejnał - a short trumpet call played live from the top of the north tower every hour, on the hour, in four directions. The melody breaks off abruptly in memory of a 13th-century watchman shot in the throat by a Mongol arrow.

The Cloth Hall (Sukiennice) is the long arcaded building that runs down the middle of Main Market Square, splitting it visually into two halves. The site has been a covered trading hall since the 13th century - originally for textiles from Flanders, the Levant, and beyond - and the current Renaissance form, complete with grotesque-mask attic, is the work of Italian architect Giovanni il Mosca after the original Gothic hall burned in 1555.

The ground floor still works as a market, but the goods have changed. Today the central arcade is lined with stalls selling Polish amber jewellery, hand-carved chess sets, leather goods, lace, and embroidered linen. Prices are higher than at a neighbourhood market but the quality is reliably good, and the building itself is the real attraction.

Upstairs, the Sukiennice houses the Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art - a National Museum branch with Matejko's monumental history paintings, Chełmoński's landscapes, and Wyspiański's portraits. The collection is small enough to see properly in an hour and fills in essential context for understanding Poland's pre-independence cultural life.

Kazimierz was a separate town from 1335 until 1800 and became Krakow's main Jewish quarter from the 16th century onward. After WWII the district stood largely empty for fifty years; since the late 1990s it has come back as the city's most atmospheric neighbourhood, where surviving synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, and prewar tenements share the cobbled streets with art galleries, vintage shops, and some of the best bars in Poland.

The Jewish heritage core is along Szeroka Street. The Old Synagogue (Stara Synagoga), now a museum of Krakow Jewish history, is the oldest surviving synagogue in Poland and dates to the 15th century. The Remuh Synagogue and its Renaissance cemetery, the High Synagogue, and the Tempel Synagogue are all within a few minutes' walk. Plac Nowy, the small octagonal market square with its central rotunda, is the heart of the modern scene - eat a zapiekanka (open-faced baguette with mushrooms and cheese) from one of the rotunda windows for the most local possible lunch.

After dark Kazimierz turns into Krakow's bar district. Courtyards behind unmarked doors hide some of the city's best craft-beer pubs, vodka rooms, and live-jazz cellars; the atmosphere is rougher than the Old Town and considerably more interesting.

The former enamel factory at ulica Lipowa 4 is where Oskar Schindler ran his Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik from 1939 to 1945 and saved approximately 1,200 Jewish workers from deportation - the story documented in Thomas Keneally's novel and Steven Spielberg's 1993 film. Since 2010 the building has been a branch of the Historical Museum of Krakow with a permanent exhibition titled 'Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945'.

The museum is much broader than the Schindler story. Across two floors and 45 rooms, the exhibition walks chronologically through the occupation - the German invasion of September 1939, the establishment of the Krakow Ghetto on the Podgórze side of the river, daily life under occupation, the liquidation of the ghetto in March 1943, the Płaszów concentration camp, and the underground resistance. Schindler's original office, with the famous wall of enamelware and the desk where he typed the list, is preserved at the centre of the visit.

The exhibition is dense and emotionally heavy; expect to spend two to three hours and allow time to decompress afterwards. The neighbourhood around the factory - the former Podgórze ghetto - is itself part of the visit, with surviving fragments of the ghetto wall on Lwowska Street and the empty chairs memorial in plac Bohaterów Getta.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine produced rock salt continuously from the 13th century until 1996, and the upper levels are now one of the oldest tourist attractions in Europe - Copernicus, Goethe, and Pope John Paul II all visited. The site joined the original UNESCO World Heritage list in 1978, and the standard Tourist Route descends 135 metres below ground through 800 metres of corridors and 20 chambers carved entirely out of salt.

The unmissable highlight is the Chapel of St Kinga, 101 metres underground - a full-sized subterranean church with salt-crystal chandeliers, salt-rock floors polished to look like marble, and altarpieces, reliefs, and even a copy of Leonardo's Last Supper carved by miners over more than 70 years. The chapel is still consecrated and hosts weddings.

Practical notes: the tour is guided only, lasts about two hours, and ends with a lift back to the surface (no climbing required). The temperature underground is a constant 14-16°C year-round - bring a light jacket even in August. The mine is wheelchair accessible only on a separate route booked in advance.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum preserves the two surviving camps of the largest Nazi concentration and extermination complex, where at least 1.1 million people - the overwhelming majority of them Jews - were murdered between 1940 and 1945. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a Polish state museum, and one of the most heavily-visited memorial sites in the world, with over two million visitors a year.

A standard visit covers both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, connected by a free shuttle. Auschwitz I is the former Polish army barracks turned camp, with brick blocks containing the permanent exhibitions on Jewish, Roma, and Polish victims, suitcases and shoes confiscated from arrivals, the gas chamber and crematorium, and the cell where Maximilian Kolbe died. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, three kilometres away, is the much larger purpose-built extermination camp - the rail spur, the ruined gas chambers, and the wooden and brick barracks stretch across more than 170 hectares.

Entry to the memorial is free, but a timed ticket booked online at visit.auschwitz.org is mandatory between April and October, and an educator-guided tour (3.5 hours, paid) is required for entries before 4pm in peak months. Allow a full day in total including travel.

During the major Rynek Główny excavations of 2005-2010, archaeologists uncovered four metres of stratified medieval Krakow lying directly under the modern paving stones - cobbled streets, merchants' stalls, a cemetery, and the foundations of buildings burned during the Tatar raids of 1241. The site was preserved in situ, climate-controlled, and opened in 2010 as the Rynek Underground branch of the Historical Museum of Krakow.

The exhibition is a multimedia time-tunnel, not a glass-case museum. Touchscreens, holograms, and projections layered onto the original archaeology recreate Krakow as a 13th-century trade junction on the Amber and Salt Roads. Highlights include the burial of a suspected vampire (a body buried face-down with a stone in the mouth), reconstructed merchant goods, full-scale models of medieval Krakow houses, a fog projection of the city's 14th-century skyline, and a 600kg lead ingot recovered from the foundations of the Cloth Hall.

The site is genuinely cold and humid - dress warmly even in summer - and visit duration is capped at three hours per ticket. Free entry on Tuesdays sells out fastest.

At the northern edge of the Old Town, the Krakow Barbican (Barbakan) and St Florian's Gate (Brama Floriańska) are the only substantial survivors of the medieval city walls that once ringed the Rynek with eight kilometres of fortifications, 47 watchtowers, and seven gates. The walls were demolished in the early 19th century to create the Planty - the green-belt park that now circles the Old Town - but these two structures were spared as the city's main ceremonial entrance.

The Barbican itself is one of only three surviving Gothic barbicans in Europe and the best preserved. Built in 1498-99 as a forward defence against Ottoman incursions, the brick rotunda has three-metre-thick walls, seven turrets, and 130 firing loopholes; the interior now houses a small museum on Krakow's military history. Walk through the connecting neck onto Floriańska Street, the most famous shopping street in the Old Town, and look up at St Florian's Gate (1307) - the surviving 33-metre tower above the gate carries a Baroque eagle and a copy of the city's miraculous image of the Virgin.

This stretch is part of the historic Royal Road, the coronation route Polish kings walked from St Florian's Gate down to Wawel Cathedral.