A Small Travel Guide to Kraków

The Czartoryski Museum is a historic museum in Kraków and one of Poland's oldest museums. Founded in 1796 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska, the museum was created to conserve the heritage of Poland and to maintain the city’s history alive.

The painting gallery includes Mantegnas, Rembrandts and Bruegels, but the undoubted highlight is Leonardo da Vinci’s compelling Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine.

In the heart of the old town is Rynek Glowny, the huge medieval market square that remains the city’s social hub with its many café terraces.

On the northeast side is the magnificently decorated, almost 600-year-old Basilica of St. Mary, with strikingly uneven rick towers. Every hour there’s a trumpet call from one of them to commemorate a bugler who was shot through the throat by a Tartar archer in 1241.

Just 13km southeast of Kraków’s city centre, in a small and unassuming grassy valley in the town of Wieliczka, one of southern Poland’s undisputed cultural and historical gems extends more than 300 metres into the salt rock veins of the earth below.

For more than seven centuries the Wieliczka Salt Mine has been a factory of superlatives, now hailed as the world’s longest active salt mine, home to the one of the world’s oldest active business ventures, and perhaps the world’s most startling example of industry meets art.

Once an independent town, Kazimierz was Krakow’s vibrant Jewish quarter until the Second World War changed everything. Recently, however, the long-neglected buildings have been restored and the area’s Jewish heritage rescued from near oblivion.

Two disused synagogues have been turned into museums; two others – still in use by the tiny remaining Jewish population – can also be visited. However, it is the Galicia Jewish Museum that holds the most touching memorial.

No ordinary hill, this limestone outcrop on the banks of the Vistula is the site of both the former home of the Polish kings and the cathedral where they were crowned and buried.

Every part of Wawel Castle’s state rooms and private apartments has painted ceilings, tapestries, fine art and antiques to marvel at. It’s a triumph of the restorers’ art: battered by marauding armies – the Swedes half burnt it and the Austrians used it as barracks – the mainly Renaissance building needed 100 years and some generous donors to get it back to its former good looks. There’s more historical splendour in the next-door 14th-century cathedral, from glittering shrines to intricately carved choir stalls, Baroque side chapels to the Royal Tombs.

On the north side of Kraków’s Old Town, far away from the Wawel castle hill, and at the end of busy Florianska Street that runs from the Rynek Główny main square, to the outer edges of the city’s medieval centre, stands the remnants of old Krakow’s 2 miles outer fortifications.

On the north side of the Old Town, nestled neatly in the Planty Park, visitors can find the impressive and forbidding structure of the Barbican. This circular building of almost 25 metres diameter was completed in the 15 century to further increase security on St. Florian’s Gate. The building is now home to permanent exhibitions of the Kraków museum and is used for open-air theatrical events throughout the year.