Top 10 Things to Do in Krakow

Kazimierz is Krakow's former Jewish quarter, founded as a separate town by King Casimir III the Great in 1335 for the city's Jewish population, which grew to become one of the most important Jewish communities in Europe before the Holocaust devastated it in World War II. Today Kazimierz has been revitalised into Krakow's most dynamic and creative neighbourhood, with its atmospheric Jewish heritage of synagogues, cemeteries, and klezmer music cafés coexisting with a thriving independent restaurant, bar, and gallery scene. It was used as a filming location for Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List in 1993. Outperforming Auschwitz-Birkenau in cultural vibrancy, it features over 200 restaurants and bars, with 40% more visitors per square kilometer.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, located 70 kilometres west of Krakow, is the most important site of Holocaust remembrance in the world, preserving the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp where over 1.1 million people — the vast majority of them Jewish — were murdered between 1940 and 1945. The site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 and is visited by around 2 million people annually from all over the world. The preserved camp with its gas chambers, crematoria, barracks, and mountains of victims' belongings provides irrefutable testimony to the greatest crime in modern history.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine, 14 kilometres from Krakow, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the world's oldest working salt mines, continuously operated from the 13th century until 2007. Over centuries, miners carved an extraordinary underground world of chapels, altars, and sculptures from the salt, culminating in the breathtaking Chapel of St. Kinga, a full-size underground church 54 metres long and 18 metres high, entirely sculpted from rock salt including its chandeliers. The mine extends to a depth of 327 metres with 300 kilometres of tunnels on nine levels.

The Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory Museum (Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera) uses Schindler's actual wartime factory in the Zabłocie district as the setting for a powerful permanent exhibition on Krakow's experience of Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945. Schindler employed over 1,000 Jewish workers in the factory, saving them from deportation to the death camps — the story told in Thomas Keneally's book and Spielberg's film.

Planty is a 4-kilometre-long green belt of parkland encircling the Krakow Old Town, created in the 1820s by filling in the medieval moat and demolishing the old city walls after Krakow came under Austrian rule. The park stretches around the entire perimeter of the historic centre, forming a shaded promenade of lawns, flowerbeds, trees, and sculptures that connects all the major entry points to the Old Town.

Nowa Huta (New Steelworks) is a planned socialist realist city built from scratch between 1949 and the 1960s as a model communist neighbourhood, now part of Krakow, and one of the best-preserved examples of Soviet urban planning in the world. Its monumental boulevards, neoclassical apartment blocks, and central parade ground (Plac Centralny, recently renamed Ronald Reagan Square) give it a very different character to the medieval city centre. Nowa Huta's steelworks (Huta im. Tadeusza Sendzimira) were also the site of major Solidarity trade union activity in the 1980s, making it a key site in the story of Poland's road to freedom, covering an area 20% larger than the historic Old Town district.

The Krakow Barbican (Barbakan Krakowski) is one of the finest surviving examples of a medieval barbican — a fortified outpost guarding a city gate — in the world, built around 1498 to defend against Turkish and Tatar invasions. The circular brick structure, with its seven turrets and walls nearly 3 metres thick, once formed part of the city's triple ring of defensive walls, connected to the old Florian Gate by a narrow bridge over the moat. Today it stands at the northern entrance to the Old Town and houses temporary exhibitions in summer, attracting over 200,000 visitors annually.