Kraków

One of the largest medieval town squares in Europe, laid out in 1257, lined with grand houses and café terraces. At its centre stands the Cloth Hall, a Renaissance market hall still filled with stalls selling amber, lace and wooden crafts, with a gallery of Polish art upstairs and an underground museum of the city's history beneath the square.

A Gothic brick church with two unequal towers on the corner of the square. Inside, the carved wooden altarpiece by Veit Stoss, completed in 1489, is one of the great masterpieces of late Gothic art. Every hour, a trumpeter plays a melody, the Hejnał, from the taller tower, breaking off mid-note in memory of a trumpeter said to have been shot during a Mongol attack.

TipThe altarpiece is opened just before noon each day; the church is busy with worshippers, so visit respectfully.

The castle on Wawel Hill was the seat of Polish kings, with a Renaissance courtyard and state rooms hung with Flemish tapestries. Next to it, Wawel Cathedral is where Polish kings were crowned and buried, alongside national heroes and poets; Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, celebrated his first Mass in its crypt. Climb the bell tower to see the huge Sigismund Bell.

TipTickets for the castle exhibitions are sold in timed slots and sell out in summer; book online.

For centuries the centre of Jewish life in Kraków, Kazimierz has seven surviving synagogues, including the Old Synagogue, now a museum, and the Remuh Synagogue and cemetery. Today it's also the city's most atmospheric neighbourhood for cafés, bars and restaurants, especially around Plac Nowy, famous for its zapiekanki, toasted open baguettes.

The former enamel factory of Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, now houses a museum about Kraków under Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945, with immersive exhibits about daily life, the ghetto and resistance.

TipBook timed tickets in advance; it's one of the city's most popular museums.

The Planty is a ring of parkland around the Old Town, created in the nineteenth century where the walls once stood. At its northern edge, the Florian Gate and the round, red-brick Barbican are the main surviving parts of the medieval fortifications.

The largest of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camps, about an hour and a half west of Kraków, where more than a million people, most of them Jews, were murdered. The memorial and museum preserve the camps of Auschwitz I and Birkenau as a place of remembrance and education. A visit is deeply moving and essential.

TipEntry must be booked in advance on the museum's website, and guided tours are strongly recommended; allow at least three and a half hours, plus travel.

A salt mine worked for seven centuries, just south-east of the city, where miners carved chapels, statues and chandeliers out of the salt itself. The highlight is the vast Chapel of St Kinga, more than a hundred metres underground. Visits are by guided tour, descending hundreds of wooden steps.