Four days in Kraków: the prettiest city in Poland, and its hardest day out

Three nights in the old capital: the market square and St Mary's, a day on Wawel hill, the trip out to Auschwitz, and a last morning in Kazimierz.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Kraków
Places
10 across 4 days
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Kraków was the capital of Poland from 1038, and it looks it. The Tatars burned the place in 1241 and the rebuild set out a market square so large that eight centuries later nobody has worked out how to fill it. The court eventually moved to Warsaw, the city lost its political weight, and the buildings stayed exactly where they were. That is the whole story of why Kraków looks like this and Warsaw does not.

It is also a student city, with a university founded in 1364 and something like a fifth of the population enrolled in one institution or another. The effect is a very beautiful old town that is not a museum: the square has as many people drinking on it at eleven at night as photographing it at eleven in the morning, and the cheapest lunch in the centre is still a canteen serving pork and potatoes for the price of a coffee elsewhere.

Three nights covers the old town, Wawel hill and the Jewish quarter at a walking pace, with one whole day given to Auschwitz, 50 km west. That day is not an add-on and it is not something to fit around lunch. Most people find it takes the rest of the evening as well.

Highlights

  • The largest medieval square in Europe, and a trumpet call from the tower of St Mary's that stops mid-note every hour
  • Veit Stoss's carved altarpiece, twelve years of limewood and gold, finished in 1489
  • Wawel: the castle, the royal crypts and the bell you can still hear across the city
  • Copernicus's instruments and a globe drawn before anybody knew the shape of America
  • Kazimierz on a Sunday morning, before the bars open and while the synagogues are still quiet

Where to stay

Kraków, three nights

The shape of the city is simple. In the middle is the walled old town, now a rough oval ringed by a park where the walls stood until 1820. At its centre is the market square, at its southern tip is Wawel hill above the river, and a kilometre south of that is Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, which was a separate town for most of its history and is now where people go to drink.

Sleep inside the ring or in Kazimierz. The old town is quieter than you would expect once you are off the square, though the streets north of it get loud at weekends with stag groups, which the city has been trying to discourage for twenty years with mixed success.

Everything else worth seeing is a tram ride: the enamel factory museum in Podgórze over the river, the mounds on the western hills, and the concrete grid of Nowa Huta, the steel town Stalin built next door in 1949 to give a stubbornly bourgeois city a proletariat.

Day by day

Day 1 in Kraków

The market square, St Mary's and the Cloth Hall

Walk in from wherever you are staying and stop when the square opens up in front of you. It runs 200 metres on each side and it was set out in a single plan after the Tatars burned the city in 1241, which is how a medieval town came to have a perfect rectangle at its centre.

Do St Mary's first, because it shuts to visitors in the late afternoon. The altarpiece inside is the reason: Veit Stoss spent twelve years carving it, and the wings are opened late each morning, which is worth timing if you can. On the hour, a trumpeter plays four times from the taller tower and breaks off mid-phrase, in memory of the one who was supposedly shot through the throat sounding the alarm.

Then the long trading hall down the centre of it, and then find a table. Kraków is a city that eats late and drinks later, and the first evening is the one to spend on the square rather than planning the next day.

  1. 15:00

    Main Market Square

    Visit

    Two hundred metres square, laid out in the thirteenth century and never built on since. Walk the whole perimeter once before you sit down anywhere; the arcades on the north side are the ones with the shade.

  2. 16:00

    St Mary's Basilica

    Visit

    Gothic brick with two towers of different heights, and inside, Veit Stoss's altarpiece of 1477 to 1489, the largest of its kind anywhere. The wall paintings are by Matejko. Buy the ticket at the kiosk opposite the side door, not at the main entrance, which is for worshippers.

  3. 17:15

    Cloth Hall

    Visit

    The fourteenth century trading hall in the middle of the square, given a Renaissance top in the 1550s. The arcade at ground level is souvenir stalls and open around the clock; upstairs is the nineteenth century Polish painting collection, which is small, excellent and almost empty.

  4. 19:30

    Dinner off the square

    Eat

    The tables on the square itself are for the view. The kitchens one street back, towards the university, charge half as much for better pierogi.

With more time: The north end of the old town keeps its last medieval gate and the round brick barbican outside it, both five minutes from the square and both worth the walk even without going in. The Czartoryski collection, two streets away, has Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine hanging in a room where you can stand in front of it for as long as you like.

Day 2 in Kraków

The old university, then all of Wawel hill

Start at the university, a few minutes west of the square, which opens mid-morning. The oldest building went up between 1364 and 1400 around an arcaded courtyard, and the museum inside holds the instruments Copernicus used as a student here, along with a globe made around 1510, the earliest known to show America, which puts it well away from where it belongs.

Then south along the old royal route to Wawel. The hill has been fortified since anybody was writing things down, and the castle on top is where Polish kings lived until the court went to Warsaw at the end of the sixteenth century. The courtyard and the grounds are free to walk; the state rooms, the armoury and the treasury are separate tickets, sold in limited numbers, and the queue for them at eleven in July is not worth joining.

Leave an hour for the cathedral. Every Polish monarch of consequence is buried under it, along with a good number of the poets and generals, and the Renaissance chapel with the gold dome is the finest thing on the hill.

  1. 10:00

    Collegium Maius

    Historic

    The university's oldest building, 1364 to 1400, entered through a Gothic courtyard with a working astronomical clock. Copernicus studied here, his instruments are in the museum, and oxygen was first liquefied in a usable state in these rooms in 1883. Tours run on the hour and are worth booking.

  2. 12:00

    Lunch on Grodzka

    Eat

    The street running from the square to Wawel is lined with places to eat and most of them are fine. A milk bar on this stretch will feed you properly for the price of a beer elsewhere.

  3. 13:00

    Wawel

    Historic

    The royal hill above the Vistula: castle, cathedral, courtyard and gardens inside one wall. Walking the site costs nothing, the interiors are separately ticketed with timed entry, and the arcaded Renaissance courtyard is the thing to see even if you buy nothing.

  4. 15:15

    Wawel Cathedral

    Religious

    The coronation and burial church of the Polish kings, Gothic from the fourteenth century with chapels added for six hundred years afterwards. Karol Wojtyła said his first mass here in November 1946, forty years before he came back as pope. Climb the wooden stairs to the Sigismund Bell if the queue is short.

With more time: There is a dragon's cave in the limestone under the castle, reached from the eastern terrace and opening onto the riverbank, which children find far more interesting than the state rooms. It is open from April to October only. Afterwards, the path along the water below the hill is the nicest half hour's walk in the city.

Day 3 in Kraków

Auschwitz and Birkenau

Leave early. The bus takes ninety minutes, and a slot before eleven means the site is not yet at its fullest and you are not walking Birkenau in the middle of the afternoon.

Auschwitz I comes first. It was a Polish army barracks the Germans requisitioned in 1940, and the brick blocks now hold the exhibitions: the confiscated belongings, the room of hair, the national memorials, the punishment cells in the basement of block 11, the wall where several thousand people were shot. The one surviving gas chamber is at the far end, rebuilt after the war to its wartime layout, and there is a sign inside that says so.

A free shuttle runs the 3 km to Birkenau through the day. What is left there is mostly foundations, chimneys standing in rows with nothing between them, and the railway that ran through the gate to the ramp where the selections happened. The four crematoria are heaps of concrete at the far end, blown up by the SS in the last weeks. The distance is the point, and you have to walk it to understand the number.

  1. 08:00

    Bus to Oświęcim

    Travel

    Buses and minibuses leave from the coach terminal by the main station, take about ninety minutes and cost little. Organised tours pick up from the old town and cost several times as much, which buys you the transport, the guide and no arrangements to make.

  2. 10:00

    Auschwitz I

    Historic

    The original camp, and where the museum is. Entry is free but needs a booked slot, and for most of the day you have to be on a guided tour. Allow three hours and expect to be on your feet for all of them.

  3. 13:30

    Auschwitz II-Birkenau

    Culture

    Three kilometres on, and many times the size. A shuttle runs between the two sites. The gate, the rail spur, the ramp and one row of surviving barracks are near the entrance; the ruined crematoria and the memorial are a twenty minute walk away across open ground.

With more time: Do not put anything else in this day. The bus gets back to Kraków in the early evening and the useful thing to have waiting is a quiet dinner somewhere near where you are sleeping, not a plan.

Day 4 in Kraków

Kazimierz, the footbridge and the enamel factory

Kazimierz is twenty minutes on foot south of the square and the best part of the morning is spent walking it without a list. Half a dozen synagogues survive within a few streets, most of them now museums, along with a cemetery whose broken headstones were reassembled into a wall after the war. The old market square at the centre, with the round butchers' hall in the middle, is where the district drinks in the evening and eats breakfast very late.

Cross the river on the footbridge to Podgórze, where the ghetto was, and where a field of empty iron chairs in the middle of the square remembers the deportations. The factory museum is ten minutes further on.

It is not really a museum about Oskar Schindler, whatever the queue outside suggests. It is a museum about the occupation of this city, street by street and year by year, and it is one of the best of its kind in Europe. Then a tram back to the station.

  1. 09:00

    Kazimierz

    Visit

    The Jewish quarter, a separate town from 1335 until 1800, emptied in 1941 and left to fall apart until the 1990s. Now half of it is restored synagogues and half is the best bar district in Poland. Walk Szeroka, Miodowa and Józefa and go into whichever synagogue is open.

  2. 12:00

    Schindler's Enamel Factory

    Visit

    A permanent exhibition on Kraków under German occupation, laid out in the administrative building of the enamel works Schindler ran. Book the slot in advance; it sells out days ahead in summer. Allow ninety minutes and more if you read everything.

  3. 14:00

    Last lunch in Podgórze

    Eat

    Podgórze has quietly become the part of Kraków that locals recommend, and it is a short tram ride from the station. A good place to eat before a train.

With more time: The pharmacy on the ghetto square, kept open through the war by a Polish pharmacist who refused to move out, is now a small museum and takes half an hour. If you have longer, the salt mine at Wieliczka is thirty minutes out by train and the chapel carved 100 metres underground is genuinely astonishing, but it is a three hour commitment and not a thing to attempt on a departure day.

Before you go

Getting in and getting around

The airport is at Balice, 12 km west, and Ryanair, Wizz, easyJet and Lufthansa all fly there. A train runs from the terminal to Kraków Główny, the main station, in about twenty minutes, and the station sits behind a shopping centre a five minute walk from the old town wall. Winter fog causes diversions often enough to be worth knowing about if you have a tight connection.

Trains from Warsaw take about two and a half hours on the fast service and are the sensible way to arrive from anywhere else in Poland. Do not rent a car for the city: the old town is closed to traffic and you will not use it.

Everything in the centre is walkable and the only place you cannot reach on foot is Auschwitz. The streets are flat and cobbled, so bring shoes you can stand on all day. Trams fill in the gaps, run late, and take contactless cards on board. In winter the pavements are cleared unevenly and a slush-proof pair of boots is not an over-precaution.

Going to Auschwitz

The memorial is at Oświęcim, about 50 km west, and takes an hour and a half each way by bus or minibus from the coach station next to Kraków Główny. Organised tours from the old town cost more, include the transport and the guide, and take the planning off you. Either way, book ahead: the site is free to enter but the timed entry slots go, and in high season a guided tour is compulsory for most of the day.

There are two sites and a shuttle between them. Auschwitz I is the smaller and more complete, a requisitioned Polish army barracks where the exhibitions are, and Birkenau is 3 km away, enormous, mostly ruined and mostly empty. Three hours at the first and two at the second is a normal visit, and the walk to the far end of Birkenau and back is a long one across open ground with no shelter.

The museum recommends that visitors be at least fourteen. Dress for standing outside for hours in whatever the weather is doing. Bags larger than a small daypack are not allowed in and the lockers are limited.

Eating and drinking

Polish food in Kraków is better than its reputation and much cheaper than the equivalent further west. Pierogi come boiled or fried and filled with anything, though the two to order are ruskie (potato and curd cheese, despite the name) and mięsem (meat). Żurek is a sour rye soup, usually with sausage and a boiled egg in it, and bigos is the sauerkraut and meat stew that improves every time it is reheated.

The milk bars are the great survival: subsidised canteens from the communist period, still going, still serving a full plate for a few złoty. You queue, you point, you carry your own tray. They close in the early evening. At the other end, the square has restaurants that have been feeding visiting monarchs since the fourteenth century and price accordingly.

For a snack, the plaited ring bread sold from blue carts all over the centre costs a couple of złoty and is best before ten in the morning. In Kazimierz the equivalent is a zapiekanka, a half baguette under melted cheese and mushrooms, sold from the round market building on Plac Nowy until very late.

When to come

May, June and September are the best of it: long days, gardens open, and the square usable in the evening. July and August are hot and full, and the queue for St Mary's runs down the side of the church.

December is worth considering despite the cold. The Christmas market fills the square, the mulled wine is cheap and the light on the brick at four in the afternoon is the best it gets. January and February are grey and can sit below freezing for weeks, and Kraków's winter smog is a real thing on still days.

What people remember about Kraków is rarely a single building. It is the scale of the square at seven in the morning with nobody on it, the trumpet stopping mid-note over the traffic, and the fact that a city this pleasant sits an hour from the worst place in Europe.

Three nights holds those together without rushing either. Give the third day entirely to Oświęcim, keep the last morning for Kazimierz, and leave the rest of the time for sitting outside.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

How many days do you need in Kraków?
Two days is enough for the old town, Wawel and Kazimierz if you keep moving. The third and fourth days are what let you give Auschwitz a whole day and still have a morning left over. Anyone adding the salt mine as well should plan on five.
Is Kraków or Warsaw the better trip?
Kraków, if you are choosing one and you want the beautiful version of Poland. Warsaw is the more interesting city and the harder one to like: it was flattened in 1944 and what stands there now is a rebuilt old town, a communist skyline and a lot of very good new museums. Two nights in Warsaw pairs well with four here.
Do I have to book Auschwitz in advance?
Yes, in practice. Entry itself is free, but timed slots are limited and for most of the day you have to be on a guided tour, which is booked and paid for separately. Slots in July and August go weeks ahead.
Should I take children to Auschwitz?
The memorial recommends visitors be at least fourteen, and that is a reasonable line. With younger children, one adult can go while the other takes them to the salt mine, which is the other well known day trip and much easier company.
When is the best time to visit?
May, June and September. July and August are hot, busy and expensive; the Christmas market in December is excellent and freezing; January and February can be grey for weeks and Kraków's air quality is at its worst on still winter days.
Can I move things around?
Yes. Copy this into a trip of your own and shift the days to fit your bookings. The two fixed points are the Auschwitz slot, which dictates its whole day, and St Mary's, which is best seen around noon when the altarpiece is opened.