About Us

The Poland Guide is an independent travel resource built on first-hand experience across Poland. Between us we have made more than thirty trips covering Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, Wrocław, Zakopane, and the Białowieża borderlands — returning repeatedly rather than passing through once and calling it done. We write the guide we wished existed before our first visit.

Who writes this site

Kraków and southern Poland history writer — a cultural historian who has spent over five years researching the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, the Wawel Royal Castle complex, and the Wieliczka Salt Mine. She has attended the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Kazimierz three times, walked the full UNESCO-listed historic centre on foot in each season, and cross-checks opening hours and ticket prices against the official castle and mine websites before each update cycle.
Warsaw and urban contemporary researcher — a travel writer who lived in Warsaw's Praga district for two years and documented the city's post-war reconstruction story from the rebuilt Rynek Starego Miasta to the Neon Museum's Cold War sign collection. He covers practical Warsaw logistics — airport connections, tram routes, accommodation zones — with prices verified directly against PKP Intercity and ZTM Warsaw timetables.
Outdoor Poland and national parks editor — a hiking guide and naturalist who has completed the Orla Perć ridge traverse in the Tatra Mountains, tracked European bison in Białowieża Forest with a licensed guide, and canoed the Krutynia river through Mazurian lake country. She sources trail access rules, permit requirements, and seasonal closures from Tatrzański Park Narodowy and Białowieski Park Narodowy directly.

Kraków's layered history

Few cities in Central Europe hold as many historical strata in as small an area as Kraków. Wawel Castle stands on a limestone outcrop above the Vistula with royal apartments, a Gothic cathedral, and a dragon's cave all within the same walls. Fifteen minutes' walk south, Kazimierz was the centre of Jewish life in Poland for centuries — the Remuh Synagogue and its Renaissance-era cemetery are still in use, and the neighbourhood's cafés, bookshops, and klezmer venues make it one of the most textured urban districts in the country. The main market square, Rynek Główny, is the largest medieval market square in Europe and remains a working public space rather than a heritage park: trams run across one corner, flower sellers occupy the Cloth Hall arcades, and locals eat at the milk bars on the side streets just as visitors do.

Warsaw's reinvention and Gdańsk's maritime identity

Warsaw was almost entirely destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt from paintings, photographs, and architectural drawings — the rebuilt Old Town was granted UNESCO status specifically because of that reconstruction effort. Understanding that context changes how you experience the city: the Neon Museum in Praga preserves the illuminated signs of the communist era as design artefacts, and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is one of the most substantive museum projects built in Europe in the past two decades. Gdańsk tells a different story — a Hanseatic port city whose amber trade, Gothic brick churches, and Long Market make it feel more North Sea than Central European. The nearby Westerplatte peninsula, where the first shots of the Second World War were fired in 1939, is a thirty-minute bus ride from the city centre.

Our editorial standards

We visit in person. Our coverage of the Tatra Mountains is based on walking the trails, not summarising other people's trip reports. We verify against official sources: entry fees and opening hours for major sites are checked against the Polish Tourism Organization (POT), weather and seasonal conditions against the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (IMGW), and visa and residency requirements against the Office for Foreigners. We update when conditions change: train fares, museum admission prices, and border crossing requirements are reviewed each quarter, and individual pages carry the date of their last substantive revision.

How we keep the lights on

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