Krakow: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Warsaw was destroyed building by building in 1944 and had to be rebuilt from paintings. Kraków was not: the Germans made it the capital of their General Government and lived in it, so they had no reason to level it, and in January 1945 they left faster than they could mine it. The result is that this is the only large Polish city whose medieval centre is the original stone and not a reconstruction. Two hours, flat, and the square is the start and the end.
A short history of Krakow
The kings of Poland resided on Wawel Hill above the Vistula, and Kraków was their capital until 1596, when Sigismund III moved the court to Warsaw. In 1241 the city was destroyed in the Mongol invasion and was rebuilt around a large market square. In 1364 its university was founded, the second in Central Europe, where Copernicus later studied. Jews lived in the Kazimierz district from the 14th century, and before the Second World War they made up about a quarter of the city's population. In 1941 the Germans set up a ghetto, and most of the city's Jews were murdered. In 1978 the old city was declared a World Heritage Site.
The ten best sights in Krakow
1Rynek GłównyThe largest medieval square in Europe, 200 metres each side
2Kościół Mariacki15 zł, and a trumpet breaks off mid-note on the hour, all day
3SukienniceFree to walk through, and the gallery upstairs is 30 zł
4Wawel CastleFrom 25 zł a wing, and the grounds themselves are free
5Wawel Cathedral20 zł, and almost every Polish king is buried in it
6Collegium Maius20 zł, and Copernicus studied here from 1491
7Rynek Underground32 zł, four metres below the square, and closed on Tuesdays
8Czartoryski Museum35 zł, and Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine is in it
9Schindler’s Factory32 zł, book ahead, and it is about the occupation, not the film
10MOCAK20 zł, free on Tuesdays, and next door to the factory
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Krakow →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Krakow:
Free walking tours in Krakow
The city the war did not flatten
Warsaw was destroyed building by building in 1944 and had to be rebuilt from paintings. Kraków was not: the Germans made it the capital of their General Government and lived in it, so they had no reason to level it, and in January 1945 they left faster than they could mine it. The result is that this is the only large Polish city whose medieval centre is the original stone and not a reconstruction. Two hours, flat, and the square is the start and the end.
- Rynek Główny · Two hundred metres on each side, laid out in 1257 after the Mongols burned the previous town, and the largest medieval square in Europe. The street plan around it has not changed since that single act of replanning — every corner you turn was decided in one year, by one charter.
- Kościół Mariacki · A trumpeter plays the hejnał from the tower every hour and stops abruptly in the middle of a note. The story is that a watchman was shot in the throat warning the city of the Mongols in 1241, and the tune has been cut off in the same place ever since.
- Sukiennice · A covered cloth market in the middle of the square since the fourteenth century, and it still sells things — which is rare, because almost every equivalent in Europe became a museum. Upstairs is the national collection of nineteenth-century Polish painting, bought when Poland did not exist as a state.
- Collegium Maius · The oldest university building in Poland, from 1400, and Copernicus was a student in it from 1491 to 1495. The globe in its collection, made around 1510, is the oldest surviving globe to show the Americas — it marks a continent with "a newly discovered land".
- Brama Floriańska · The city wall was pulled down in 1810 on Austrian orders and replaced with the ring of park — but the citizens petitioned to keep this gate and the three towers beside it, arguing that without them the north wind would blow straight into the square and give everyone colds. The argument worked.
- Wawel Cathedral · Almost every Polish monarch was crowned and buried here for five hundred years. The Sigismund bell weighs nearly thirteen tonnes, needs twelve men to swing it, and is rung only a few times a year — in 2005 it was rung for the death of John Paul II, who had been archbishop of this cathedral.
Kazimierz and the river
Kazimierz was a separate city, founded in 1335 and only joined to Kraków in 1800, and for five centuries it was where the Jews of Kraków lived — sixty-eight thousand of them in 1939, about a quarter of the city. In March 1941 the Germans moved them all across the river into Podgórze, into sixteen streets. This walk is both sides of that river, and the ghetto was not in Kazimierz, which almost every visitor gets wrong. Two and a half hours.
- Ulica Szeroka · Not a street but a long square — it was the market place of the Jewish town, and four synagogues stand on it. The name means "broad street", which it is, and the buildings round it are the originals; nothing on this square was rebuilt.
- Synagoga Stara · Built around 1407 and the oldest synagogue still standing in Poland. The Germans used it as a warehouse and shot thirty hostages against its wall in 1943; it is a museum now, and the bimah in the middle is the original iron.
- Synagoga Remuh · The only synagogue in Kraków still in regular use, and the cemetery behind it opened in 1535. During the war the gravestones were broken up; in 1959 restorers found seven hundred of them buried under the ground, and the fragments that could not be matched were built into a wall.
- Plac Nowy · The round brick building in the middle was the kosher slaughterhouse, built in 1900, and the butchers’ windows round it now sell zapiekanka — half a baguette with mushrooms and cheese under a grill, invented in Poland in the 1970s when there was nothing else to put on bread.
- Plac Bohaterów Getta · This square was where people were assembled for deportation, and their furniture was left behind on it. The memorial is seventy empty bronze chairs standing in rows, one for each thousand people who passed through — and it is a working tram stop, which was deliberate.
- Schindler’s Factory · The enamelware factory where Oskar Schindler employed about eleven hundred Jews, which is almost all the building is known for — but the museum inside is about the occupation of the whole city, and Schindler gets one room. His office is left as it was, with a wall of enamel pots behind the desk.
What was built on top
In 1949 the communist government decided Kraków was too bourgeois, too Catholic and too intellectual, and built a steelworks and a city for a hundred thousand workers six kilometres from the old square. Nowa Huta was meant to dilute the place. It did the opposite: the steelworkers went on strike in 1988, the church they had been refused was built after a twenty-year fight, and the town that was supposed to be a model of the system helped end it. Half a day, and the tram goes there.
- Nowa Huta · Laid out in 1949 as a complete socialist-realist town — a central square with five avenues radiating from it, arcades, and flats built to a standard that was better than anything else in Poland at the time. Nothing in it is older than seventy-five years, and it is now a protected monument.
- Plac Centralny · The square was named after Lenin for forty years and has been named after Ronald Reagan since 2004, which the residents voted for. A statue of Lenin stood nearby until 1989, when it was removed after years of attacks — somebody had once tried to blow off its foot.
- Kopiec Krakusa · A mound sixteen metres high that was already old when the city was founded. It was excavated in the 1930s and produced an Avar bronze buckle from around the eighth century and nothing else — no burial, no chamber. Nobody knows who built it or why, and that is the whole answer.
- Kopiec Kościuszki · Built between 1820 and 1823 by volunteers who carried the earth by hand, in memory of a general who had led a failed rising — a national monument raised when the nation legally did not exist. Soil was brought from the battlefields he fought on, including in America.
- Zakrzówek · A limestone quarry that was flooded in 1990 when the pumps were switched off, filling to thirty-two metres deep with water the colour of a swimming pool. It was dangerous and unofficial for thirty years; the city built proper access and opened it legally in 2024.
- Bulwary Wiślane · The embankments under the castle, where a dozen old river barges are moored permanently as bars from May to September. The Vistula runs a thousand kilometres from here to the Baltic and is the longest river entirely inside one country in Europe.
Getting to Krakow and getting around
- Kraków Balice · The train to Kraków Główny is 20 minutes and 17 złoty
- Kraków Główny · Under a shopping centre, and Warsaw is 2:20 away
- MDA bus station · Behind the station, and the buses to Zakopane leave here
- Barbakan · The tram ring round the old town, and everything stops here
Cheap eats in Krakow
Eight counters where Kraków eats standing. The city invented the zapiekanka and sells it from windows in a round brick hall until four in the morning; a milk bar — a state-subsidised canteen left over from communism — still serves a full lunch for about twenty-five złoty, and several are still open.
- Endzior · About 18 zł, cash, and the queue at midnight is long
- Plac Nowy · The windows run all night; the market is morning only
- Stary Kleparz · Open 7 to 6, and closed Sunday afternoon
- Hala Targowa · A flea market on Sunday mornings, and a sausage van at night
- Pierogarnia Krakowiacy · Pierogi made by hand, about 25 zł for a dozen
- Hamsa · On Szeroka, Israeli food, and the terrace is the whole square
- Pod Aniołami · A 13th-century cellar, and the meat is cooked over beech
- Jama Michalika · Coffee about 18 zł, and the back room is the one to sit in
Museums in Krakow
- Czartoryski Museum · 35 zł, free on Tuesdays, and book for the Leonardo room
- Rynek Underground · 32 zł, closed Tuesdays, and book — it sells out
- Schindler’s Factory · 32 zł, book days ahead, and it is about the whole occupation
- Collegium Maius · 20 zł, guided only, and the courtyard is free to enter
- Sukiennice Gallery · 30 zł, 19th-century Polish painting, and the balcony is free
- MOCAK · 20 zł, free on Tuesdays, and beside Schindler’s factory
- Synagoga Stara · 20 zł, from 1407, and the oldest in Poland
- Apteka pod Orłem · 18 zł, free on Mondays, and it is one small room
Nature and day trips near Krakow
- Planty · Free, and the full circuit takes about an hour
- Zakrzówek · A flooded quarry 32 metres deep, and swimming is legal since 2024
- Las Wolski · Free, 420 hectares, and the zoo inside it is 32 zł
- Kopiec Kościuszki · 28 zł, 34 metres high, and built by hand in three years
- Ogród Botaniczny · 20 zł, from 1783, and the oldest botanical garden in Poland
- Bulwary Wiślane · Free, and the moored barges are bars from May
- Ojców · 40 minutes by bus, free to walk in, 12 zł for the caves
- Zakopane · Two hours by bus, and the only mountain town in Poland
Things to do in Krakow with kids
- Smocza Jama · 15 zł, open April to October, and the exit is at the river
- Wieliczka Salt Mine · 150 zł, 30 minutes out, and take a jumper
- Las Wolski zoo · 32 zł, inside the forest, and bus 134 from Salwator
- Most Ojca Bernatka · Free, and nine acrobat sculptures hang and swing from it
- Park Jordana · Free, from 1889, and the first children’s park in Europe
- Wieża Ratuszowa · 18 zł, 110 steps, and the whole square from the top
Live music in Krakow
- Filharmonia Krakowska · From 40 zł, and Penderecki conducted here for decades
- Teatr Słowackiego · From 50 zł, and the facade is lit after dark
- Opera Krakowska · From 50 zł, a 2008 building, and students pay half
- Piec Art · A cellar jazz club, live most nights, and no cover before nine
- Harris Piano Jazz Bar · On the main square, in a vaulted cellar, and free on weekdays
- Alchemia · Candlelit, in Kazimierz, and live music in the back room
Nightlife in Krakow
Kraków has more bars per square kilometre in its old town than anywhere else in Europe, and most of them are in medieval cellars because that is what the buildings have. A beer is about fifteen złoty, and nothing closes early.
- Plac Nowy · The square and every bar round it, until four
- Ulica Józefa · Kazimierz’s own street, and the bars have courtyards
- Alchemia · Open since 1999, candles, and it looks like 1920
- Plac Szczepański · The old town’s quieter square, and the terraces are on it
- Forum Przestrzenie · Free to enter, and the deckchairs are first come
- Bulwary Wiślane · The barges from May to September, and the castle above
Frequently asked questions about Krakow
What is there to see in Krakow?
The top sights in Krakow are Rynek Główny, Kościół Mariacki and Sukiennice. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Krakow?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Krakow without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Krakow?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Krakow, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The city the war did not flatten.
How do you get to Krakow and get around?
The main ways are Kraków Balice, Kraków Główny and MDA bus station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Krakow, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Krakow that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Krakow for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.