The Polish Athens, The Polish Mecca

Almost 8 years have passed since my first and only time in this beautiful city, yet my opinion and judgement has not changed but turned to even better. Now after this trip I can finally update one of my older travel guides here in my blog to a much more complete and descriptive one together with a refreshed photo album. To me this felt as visiting a new city from scratch not only for the long time not been, bur for the huge difference in the weather too!. If back in December 2009 it was super cold, grey and dark, rain and the first snow of that winter; this time in March 2017 it was a different story. A proper spring day, sunny and warm to the point of needing to remove our jackets. We could not have asked for more nor been any luckier.

Krakow is the most visited city in Poland, and the facts talk for itself: it’s been the Royal Capital city of Poland for many centuries until 1596 when it was moved to Warsaw. It has always been one of the wealthiest cities in the country, with some of the finest churches, palaces and mansions built. A very large castle growing with every king. An important merchant and trade city since the middle ages, and all this architecture and historic legacy thankfully spared from the destruction during WWII mainly because of Hitler having a special love for this city. You can expect a very large collection of historical buildings everywhere, retaining much of the Medieval urban core almost intact. No wonder why it was one of the first 12 privileged candidates to be inscribed as a World Heritage Site on the very first UNESCO list when this organisation was created in 1978.

In any case, even having so much to see, the city centre is not too big and can easily be visited in full in a day or over a weekend. Also with such a compact historical centre with most of the streets pedestrianised, following a perfect orthogonal urban grid, there is absolute no need for taking any public transportation when visiting the sights.

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