What to see in Kraków: Milan Bez Mapy’s tips for your visit

Is Kraków worth visiting? In my view, yes, and it deserves more than a day. Besides the Old Town, Wawel Castle and the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, I wouldn’t skip Nowa Huta, the communist district that surprised me. Kraków is close to Slovakia, so you can easily get there by car too.

Quick factsby Milan Bez Mapy

How long to stay

More than a day; besides the Old Town, Wawel and Kazimierz, leave time for Nowa Huta

Where I stayed

Hotel Mercure Krakow Stare Miasto, a 3-minute walk from the railway station and about 10 minutes from the centre

Nowa Huta

The communist district that surprised me; I toured it in a Trabant on a Crazy Guides trip

Observation balloon

Shows you Kraków from about 200 metres; a standard ticket costs 125 złoty (2026); in summer the queue is endless

Kazimierz

A hipster district with cafés and galleries, though I preferred the Old Town

Where to eat

Klimaty Południa, with its romantic courtyard; I recommend the meat kofta with potatoes

Visiting Kraków? I honestly don’t know why it took me so long. Just about everyone had told me it was a beautiful city and that I had to go. Maybe it was because Kraków really is close to Slovakia and easy to reach from any corner of the country. Maybe because I had no one to go with, or simply because I was waiting for the right moment. Well, that moment has finally come.

Tip from Milan I’d recommend booking your accommodation as early as you can, because rooms in a good location at a fair price go first. Here you’ll find accommodation offers in the area valid today.

Visiting Kraków: what to see, where to stay and where to eat

In this article I’ll show you what to see in Kraków, where to go, where to stop, which sights to visit and where to eat well. I wrote it in collaboration with the City of Kraków, and I have to say they did a damn good job: they showed me the best of Kraków. You’ll find it all below.

I was strolling through the lanes of the historic centre with my guide, a young blonde Polish woman, when she burst out laughing. I’d asked her how big Kraków is. She looked at me and said the biggest Polish city is Warsaw and the second biggest is Chicago. Joking aside, by population Kraków is the second-largest city in Poland. Let’s take a look around.

Where to stay in Kraków

Finding accommodation in Kraków is easy. I stayed at the Mercure Krakow Stare Miasto, a four-star hotel in the Old Town, just a three-minute walk from the railway station and about 10 minutes on foot from the centre and the main square. What I liked most was the very stylish décor and the reception full of paintings. I’d also mention the breakfast, served until 11am (in case the party runs late), and the fitness centre. Thank you for having me.

Where to eat in Kraków: my restaurant tips

Kraków is above all a treat for the taste buds. I won’t claim to know which restaurant in Kraków is the best, but I picked these, and I ate at every one of them. For each I’ll tell you what I liked most.

1. Pod Baranem is a short walk from Wawel Castle. They cook strictly with fresh ingredients, so you wait a little longer for your food. The restaurant doubles as a gallery of paintings, which I really liked; I think it’s a very creative idea.
2. Trattoria La Campana is a beautiful restaurant with a courtyard in the centre of Kraków. It even has some kind of Michelin award from 2019. The courtyard alone is worth a stop, even if only for a coffee.
3. Klimaty Południa is another restaurant with a very romantic courtyard, ideal for a date. I recommend their meat kofta with potatoes. Delicious.
4. The Piano Rouge is a restaurant in the main square. Do pop inside: it’s a cabaret.
5. Kogel Mogel is another restaurant with a lovely courtyard.

The best restaurants in Kraków

Kraków’s Old Town: the walls, the church, the main street and the square

Thanks to its trade routes and location, Kraków was a very wealthy city. It was a kind of crossroads between east and west, and on top of that, salt was mined here. The historic centre is completely walled, and the only way in is through its gates. Most medieval towns worked this way. Kraków had eight of these gates, but only the Florian Gate (Brama Floriańska) survives today.

And it’s a beauty: the Florian Gate stands right opposite a round building called the Barbican (Barbakan), part of the old defences. The houses in the heart of the city are laid out symmetrically, which tells you how its builders thought. The city was planned carefully and in a modern way; it didn’t just grow. That’s why it’s so easy to find your way around today. Manhattan in New York has a similar grid of streets. The same layout gives the city countless tucked-away courtyards with cafés and restaurants. They’re all worth a visit.

Visiting Kraków with Milan Bez Mapy

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Things to do in Kraków: the sights worth visiting

Floriańska Street and the Jama Michalika café

One of the city’s biggest draws is its main street, Floriańska. It runs from the Florian Gate all the way to the main square. I’d especially point you to the Jama Michalika café, one of the best-known cafés in Kraków. What makes it unusual is that it has no windows. Why? Artists from the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) movement of the day furnished it, and there’s a simple reason for the missing windows. When you’re an artist and need to create, you wait for your muse and your ideas, and a window would only distract you. You need to concentrate on art, not stare out of the window. Right? On top of that, the famous Green Balloon cabaret (Zielony Balonik) started in this very café. The interior is very distinctive, which is no surprise: artists designed it.

You’ll find tours of Kraków and trips out of the city here:

St Mary’s Basilica and the Veit Stoss altarpiece

Take a good look at the buildings as you wander the streets. Kraków is special because it was one of the few cities not destroyed in the Second World War. That’s why the buildings you see today are originals that have stood for centuries. As you carry on into the centre, you can’t miss the big church that dominates the whole square. Its great altarpiece took 12 long years to carve, and students helped to make it. It’s about 13 metres high and, with its wings open, 11 metres wide. The whole altarpiece is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and is said to hold more than 200 wooden figures. The tallest is 2.7 metres, the smallest just 15 centimetres.

Tip from Milan I’ve also written about what to see in Gdańsk, in northern Poland.

Every hour, a trumpet call rings out from St Mary’s tower

The windows behind the altar are original, and the paintings on them are beautiful. They’re worth a close look. Every hour, a real person opens a window in the church’s tallest tower and plays a short tune, the hejnał, whether it’s three in the afternoon or three in the morning. It’s a symbol of Kraków.

The tune always breaks off before the end, though. Legend has it that the original trumpeter who played it in the tower was brutally murdered, shot in the throat. Nobody knows if that’s true, but the tradition has stayed with Kraków.

Rynek traditions and the observation balloon

Another tradition is selling flowers in the Rynek, the main square, and in December Christmas decorations as well. Poles spend the whole year getting ready for them. The competition for the most beautiful Kraków nativity scene (szopka) is so prestigious that locals start preparing for it as early as spring. The rules are clear: the decorations must include elements of Kraków’s architecture, and the biggest can be as tall as 2 metres. The winners’ reward is that their creations stay on display in an exhibition at the city’s history museum once the competition is over.

The observation balloon on the bank of the Vistula is worth a stop too. From 200 metres up (that’s what my watch measured), it gives you a panoramic view of Kraków. VIP tickets that put you at the front of the queue are no longer on offer. In 2026 a standard ticket costs 125 złoty, and you can buy it online too. The queue for the balloon is endless, especially in summer.

Rynek Underground: the museum beneath Kraków’s main square

What lies beneath the Rynek will surprise you even more. The whole square has been dug out, and under its pretty paving stones you’ll find a vast underground museum, Rynek Underground. I went in and picked up some fascinating titbits. For example, towns used to be built with oak. Why? It lasts to this day. The museum has uncovered original medieval roads, and you can clearly see they were reinforced with oak. Coins weren’t valued by how many you had but by their weight: if you had two thin coins, the person with one thick coin was richer. The Rynek above my head was an important place of trade. Townspeople came here to buy gold, metals, leather, shoes and hides. Back then, people were buried with their hands and feet tied. Nobody knows why. Maybe so they wouldn’t escape like zombies, or maybe they were buried alive.

Work on the museum began in 2005 and went on until 2010. For five years the square was dug up, a real nuisance for the people who lived there. Today more than 100,000 university students study in Kraków.

Wawel Castle and its tapestry collection

Wawel, the castle above the city, is one of the most beautiful places I saw in Kraków. The first thing that caught my eye was the lovely park and garden, where a robot lawnmower was doing its rounds. You can’t stop progress. The golden dome of the Sigismund Chapel, which gleams from far away, really is gilded. But what fascinated me most was the collection of tapestries that decorate the castle’s halls. They’re known as arrases, and King Sigismund Augustus ordered them from Flanders in the 16th century. They’re neither embroidered nor painted but woven from wool, silk and gold and silver thread. The biggest measure several metres in both width and height. The dyes are natural, so many have faded over time. That doesn’t matter: they’re still very beautiful.

Weavers worked on the largest ones for several years, and they cost a fortune. Back then, only the very richest could afford a hand-woven tapestry like this. Do look up at the ceilings now and then too. One room has a beautiful coffered ceiling decorated with human heads, carved from wood, naturally.

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Kazimierz, Kraków’s Jewish quarter

Kazimierz is pronounced roughly ‘ka-ZHEE-myesh’. When I posted a story on my Instagram @milan_bezmapy saying I was off to Kraków, many of you told me Kazimierz was the most beautiful part of the city. I can’t agree, as I preferred the Old Town, but Kraków’s Jewish quarter was very pretty too. It’s mainly for young people with a slightly more hipster lifestyle. You’ll find cafés, galleries, and vegan and Jewish restaurants. It’s a different Kraków with a completely different vibe. The buildings are lower than in the centre, usually with just one upper floor, and it’s a kind of cheaper version of central Kraków.

King Casimir the Great founded Kazimierz in 1335 as a separate town next to Kraków. Jews arrived later. At the end of the 15th century, after a fire and unrest, King John I Albert ordered them to leave Kraków, and the Jewish community moved to Kazimierz. A Jewish quarter grew up here with its own synagogues and walls. Jews could still come to Kraków to trade, but they weren’t allowed to live there. One thing I’d point out, though: the Nazi ghetto during the war was not in Kazimierz but across the Vistula in Podgórze.

Later, in 1800, Kazimierz became part of Kraków, and in the 19th century Jews were gradually able to settle in other parts of the city too. Before the war, Kraków had one of the largest Jewish communities in Poland, about 60,000 people. Only a small fraction of them survived the Holocaust. In many places you can still see parts of the original walls.

Nowa Huta: the communist district locals were afraid to visit

Socialism. My favourite period of history, and one I would never want to live in. Nowa Huta is a part of Kraków that hardly seems to belong to it. Even people from Kraków stayed away, because they saw Nowa Huta as a dangerous ghetto full of hooligans. That wasn’t quite true, though. Nowa Huta is a model socialist town where everything is tidy and works.

It was meant to be a rival to historic Kraków. A town with everything except a church. Under communism, religion wasn’t allowed, and Nowa Huta was the first town in Poland without God. A church did go up in the end, but only after pressure from residents and several protests in which hundreds were injured and almost 500 people were arrested. And of course, it was only allowed outside this perfect socialist complex.

The Lenin statue in Kraków

A town created by demolishing the villages around it. A town steeped in socialist propaganda. One of the lies the propaganda spread was that by tearing down the villages, the communists had done the people living there a favour, supposedly rescuing them from the poverty that reigned. That’s nonsense: the soil in Nowa Huta is the most fertile for miles around. In reality, the communists simply took the land and expropriated the original villages of Mogiła, Pleszów and Krzesławice. The centrepiece of this regular, ‘perfect’ complex is the so-called Avenue of Roses (Aleja Róż), which ends in a large square that was ideal for speeches and lectures full of propaganda. In the middle of it stood a huge statue of Lenin.

The statue faced the Tatras, where Lenin liked to spend his free time. After the fall of communism it was toppled, hauled off to a forest outside the city and dumped flat on the ground. Later a Swedish millionaire and collector took it from there and put Lenin in his amusement park. If only Lenin knew. I suspect it would have put a few more lines on his forehead. Nowa Huta was designed for 100,000 people, with community gardens, an artificial lake with an island and plenty of nursery schools.

The former steelworks in Nowa Huta

But where did all its residents work? In the steelworks right next to the town. The steelworks were so close and polluted the air so badly that a blue sky over Nowa Huta was the exception rather than the rule. What surprised me, though, was how far ahead the communists were thinking. At a time when owning a car was about as likely as a trip into space is today, Nowa Huta’s town plan included parking.

Underground car parks for people who had no cars. Maybe the idea was to motivate residents to work hard enough to afford a car, since there was already somewhere to park it? Back then people waited years for a car. Beneath the town there’s also a bunker, though it wasn’t built to withstand a nuclear attack. Plans for that exist, but they were never carried out.

The bunker has a telephone exchange with excellent ventilation against smog, and backup batteries. If the power had gone off, the smog from the steelworks would have suffocated everyone inside. The ventilation was hooked up to a bicycle, so someone could also pedal to keep it running if needed. The battery room, however, has no ventilation: if a fire broke out there, they would simply shut it so the fire couldn’t spread. I visited Nowa Huta in authentic style, in a Trabant. It was an organised trip back to communist times with Crazy Guides. Lately, Nowa Huta has been getting more and more trendy. It’s green and there’s plenty of space. Living close to nature, with room around you, matters more and more to people, especially after the series of lockdowns we all went through.

Visiting Kraków: Milan Bez Mapy’s final tips

Kraków made my jaw drop. Seriously. Stay more than a day and I’m sure you’ll love it. Besides the classic sights, don’t forget the lovely district of Nowa Huta.

You might also like my article Poland in autumn: three tips on what to see and where to go.