The Main Square takes an hour. Kraków takes a week.
What a guided run to Auschwitz-Birkenau actually includes, and how far ahead it has to be booked. Whether the salt mine earns a half day. What Zakopane costs once the thermal baths go on the bill. Reviews of every tour you can book in Kraków.
Wawel Hill, the salt mine, Birkenau, the Tatra ridge.
The four days a first trip to Kraków gets built around. What each one costs and how long it takes.
01The memorial dayAuschwitz-Birkenau Guided Tour & Hotel PickupOut of the city at first light, around three and a half hours inside the museum, back in Kraków by mid-afternoon.- 02The morning undergroundWieliczka Salt Mine TourChambers and a chapel cut out of rock salt, 135 metres down. The English-language slots go first.
03The mountain dayCable Car, Chocholow Baths, Cheese & VodkaCable car above Zakopane, thermal water afterwards, grilled oscypek and a shot of vodka on the road home.- 04The first afternoonOld Town Krakow & Wawel Castle Walking TourCloth Hall, the bugle call, the cathedral on Wawel Hill. Two hours that make the rest of the map legible.
Kraków keeps the record of 1939 to 1945 in four separate places.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is an hour and a half west of the city. The other three are inside it: the enamel factory on Lipowa Street, the ghetto over the river in Podgórze, and the camp ground at Płaszów. What each visit involves, and what it costs to join one.
Auschwitz-Birkenau Guided Tour & Hotel Pickup
Auschwitz-BirkenauTimed entry with a guide, transport from Krakow, most of the day.
Schindler’s FactoryThe occupation of the city, told inside the enamel works on Lipowa Street.
The Ghetto in PodgorzeThe wall fragments, Plac Bohaterow Getta and the pharmacy on the square.
PlaszowThe camp ground above the city, walked with a guide who knows what stood where.
All 94 Auschwitz-Birkenau tours →
Kraków first, then the mine, the memorial or the mountains.
A market square that has not moved in seven hundred years, a cathedral carved out of salt, the largest memorial site in Europe, a Jewish quarter on both banks of the Vistula, and a mountain range two hours down the road.
Wieliczka is a cathedral, and it is cut out of salt.
Nine levels and a chapel with salt chandeliers, 135 metres beneath a commuter town twenty minutes from the Main Square. Most tours are a stairwell down, a couple of hours walking, and a lift back up; the ones that pair it with Auschwitz-Birkenau take the whole day.
Two hours south of Kraków the road runs into the Tatras.
The Zakopane day is a cable car, a plate of grilled oscypek and an afternoon in thermal water that comes out of the ground warm enough to sit in through snow. Every one of these leaves Kraków after breakfast and is back for dinner.
Kraków’s Old Town is a twenty-minute walk and a full day.
Everything in the Old Town →
Everything inside the ring of park is on foot: the Cloth Hall in the middle of the square, the Barbican at the top of Floriańska, the church with the bugle call that stops mid-phrase, and the castle on the rock at the end of Grodzka. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the centre.
Wawel: castle, cathedral, or both
The state rooms and the cathedral are separate tickets and both run on slots. The cathedral, the crypt of the kings and the climb to the Sigismund bell is the half most people remember.
Rynek Underground, four metres down
A medieval market street excavated beneath the Cloth Hall, with the cellars, the weighing scales and the road surface left exactly where they were found.
St Mary’s, and the hejnał on the hour
The Veit Stoss altarpiece is opened late morning, and the bugle call breaks off mid-phrase from the taller tower every hour, as it has done since the fifteenth century.
Kraków’s most-booked days out.
Every Kraków tour we have reviewed →The tours more travellers take than anything else in the city, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Auschwitz-Birkenau Guided Tour & Hotel Pickup
Travel from Krakow by air-conditioned bus to Auschwitz-Birkenau for a 3.5-hour guided visit. You’ll see the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, barracks, gas chambers, belongings, and Birkenau platforms, with guides such as Nicholas or Ziggy explaining the site in clear, respectful detail.
From · $21
Read our review →
2
Cable Car, Chocholow Baths, Cheese & Vodka
from $54
3
Wieliczka Salt Mine Tour
from $33
4
Evening or Night River Cruise
from $24
5
Oskar Schindler’s Factory Entry Ticket & Guided Tour
from $35
6
City Sightseeing Tour by Electric Golf Cart
from $13
7
Chopin Piano Recital at Chopin Concert Hall
from $18
8
Wawel Castle & Cathedral Guided Tour
from $57
Kraków’s Jewish quarter is two districts with a river between them.
Kazimierz keeps the seven synagogues, the Remuh cemetery and the bars that took over the old shopfronts. Across the Vistula in Podgórze are the surviving stretches of ghetto wall, the square of empty chairs, and the enamel factory Oskar Schindler ran on Lipowa Street.
Every Kazimierz and Ghetto tour →
What a day out of Kraków actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what it costs. Most of the best days here sit in the bottom band.
Old Town walks, museum entry, the golf-cart circuit, the salt mine and most guided runs to the memorial.
The full days out: Zakopane with the thermal baths, Auschwitz-Birkenau combined with Wieliczka, the Dunajec raft.
Private guides, Częstochowa and Wadowice in one run, the Slovakia treetop day, and a car with a driver for the whole of it.
Four Kraków bookings that will not wait.
Most of this city can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on entry slots, capped rooms and museum calendars that take no interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Auschwitz-Birkenau Guided Tour & Hotel PickupEntry to the museum is capped and, through the main season, individual visitors join a timed guided group or do not go in at all.
- 02Wieliczka Salt Mine TourGroups go down on a timetable and the English-language ones fill first. The lift back to the surface takes the same queue in reverse.
- 03Rynek Underground Museum Guided TourThe chambers under the Cloth Hall hold a fixed number of people at a time, and the free-entry day is spoken for before it opens.
- 04Oskar Schindler’s Factory Entry Ticket & Guided TourEntry to the factory museum is timed, and the ticket desk runs out days ahead through the summer.
Kraków eats late, cheaply, and mostly in cellars.
Pierogi rolled out on somebody else’s kitchen table, zapiekanka off the round market in Kazimierz, obwarzanki from the blue carts on every second corner, and a flight of Polish vodka poured cold enough to hurt. Most of it costs less than lunch does further west.
- 1Cable Car, Chocholow Baths, Cheese & Vodkafrom $54
- 2Zakopane Cable Car, Vodka, Cheese & Hot Springs Tourfrom $26
- 3Krakow Food Tasting Tour with Delicious Polandfrom $105
From November the Kraków day happens indoors, or 135 metres under it.
The Old Town goes grey and quiet between November and March, which is the best time to be in it. The salt mine holds the same temperature all year, the museums empty out, the cellars are warm, and the thermal pools in the Tatra foothills are at their best with snow on the roof.
Under Kraków: a salt cathedral, a market street and a steel town.
Old squares and hilltop castles are everywhere in Central Europe. A chapel carved out of rock salt, a medieval road four metres beneath the Cloth Hall, and a whole district built as an argument against the city next to it are not.
The Wieliczka Salt Mine
Nine levels, around three hundred kilometres of tunnel, and a chapel forty metres long whose floor, altarpieces and chandeliers were all cut out of the rock salt by miners working their own shifts. The tourist route covers a fraction of it: a stairwell down, a couple of hours walking level, and a lift back up in a cage built for coal.
- 1Wieliczka Salt Mine Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 9,393 reviews
- 2Auschwitz-Birkenau and Salt Mine Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 9,020 reviews
- 3Wieliczka Salt Mine Guided Tour with Transport★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 7,429 reviews
Nowa Huta
In 1949 the state put a steelworks and a town for a hundred thousand workers on farmland east of Kraków, intending a proletarian counterweight to a city of priests and professors. The plan produced boulevards on a Renaissance grid, a church the authorities fought for twenty years, and the district that eventually went on strike against them.
- 1Nowa Huta Guided Tour in Vintage Car★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 277 reviews
- 2Legendary Private Nowa Huta Communism Tour with Crazy Guides★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 262 reviews
- 3Steelworks Administration Buildings/Shelters Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 160 reviews
Rynek Underground
Excavations under the Main Square in the 2000s hit the medieval market intact: road surfaces, merchant stalls, weighing scales, coins and a lead seal works. Rather than backfill it the city glassed it over and left everything in place, so the museum is the fourteenth-century square standing underneath the present one.
- 1Rynek Underground Museum Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 1,122 reviews
- 2Guided Tour of Rynek Underground★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 113 reviews
- 3Rynek Underground Museum Skip-the-line Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 101 reviews
By place — the city and the roads out of it
By kind of day — walk, museum, mountain or table
Three days in Kraków, and two more for the road out of it.
The newest Kraków tour reviews.
The rest of the new ones →
Wawel Castle, Cathedral, Old Town and St. Mary’s Basilica
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ZALIPIE – painted village, unique PRIVATE tour from Krakow
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ZALIPIE – painted village, unique small group tour from Krakow
Read our review →
Schindler’s Factory & Ghetto & Plaszow Camp Guided Tour
Read our review →
Private Tour to Auschwitz & Birkenau from Katowice
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Katowice Airport Krakow Private Transfer, Private Driver Service
Read our review →
Czestochowa the Black Madonna Day Tour from Krakow
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Ojców National Park and Ogrodzieniec Castle Tour from Krakow
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Rynek Underground Museum Skip-the-line Guided Tour
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Krakow City Pass – Museums, Atractions & City Transport
Read our review →