Lesser Poland
Discover Lesser Poland
Introduction
Lesser Poland is the historic south of the country, and it escaped the destruction that flattened so much of the rest — which is why it holds the greatest concentration of surviving old architecture in Poland.
Kraków was the royal capital for five hundred years and came through the Second World War almost intact. Its market square is the largest medieval one in Europe, with the cloth hall in the middle and a trumpeter who breaks off mid-phrase from the church tower every hour, as the story has it, at the point where a Mongol arrow found his predecessor. Wawel hill holds the castle and cathedral where Polish kings were crowned and buried. The whole centre was on the first UNESCO World Heritage list in 1978.
Two more World Heritage sites sit within an hour: the Wieliczka salt mine, worked since the thirteenth century, with chapels, chandeliers and altarpieces carved by miners out of the salt itself; and Auschwitz-Birkenau, preserved as a memorial and museum on the site of the largest of the Nazi extermination camps. South of the city the Tatra mountains rise to two and a half thousand metres at Zakopane, with its own highlander architecture, dialect and smoked sheep’s cheese.