Discover Pomerania

Pomerania is Poland’s Baltic coast: long sand beaches backed by pine, shifting dunes, and a maritime history quite separate from the rest of the country. The province’s wealth came from the sea and from amber, which washes up along this shore and has been traded south from here since the Bronze Age.

Gdańsk is the city. It was a Hanseatic port and then, for two decades between the wars, a free city under League of Nations protection; the Second World War began here on 1 September 1939 with the shelling of the Westerplatte peninsula, and the town was largely destroyed and then rebuilt in its old form. Forty years later the strikes at the Lenin Shipyard produced Solidarity, and the European Solidarity Centre now stands beside the gate where it happened. Next door, Sopot has a wooden pier nearly half a kilometre long and Gdynia is the modernist port built from scratch in the 1920s.

West along the coast the Słowiński national park has dunes up to forty metres high that move several metres a year and bury forest as they go. Inland, Kashubia has its own language, still spoken and taught, and a landscape of small lakes and wooden churches. The season is short — July and August — and the Baltic is cold, which does not deter anybody.