319 articles found
Getting Around Poland: The Complete Transportation Guide
Poland is well connected internally and surprisingly easy to navigate. The country has invested heavily in modernising its rail infrastructure over the past decade, and combined with an excellent intercity bus network, getting between Poland's major ...
Gdańsk: Where World War II Started — and One of Poland's Greatest Cities
At 4:45am on 1 September 1939, the German warship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte, on the outskirts of Gdańsk. The 182 Polish defenders held for seven days against overwhelming German force. It was ...
Wrocław: Poland's Most Beautiful Market Square and Why You Should Visit
Wrocław (formerly the German city of Breslau) is one of Central Europe's most interesting cities — not just for its jaw-dropping Gothic and Renaissance market square, but for the layered, complicated history carved into every stone of this place that...
The Tatra Mountains: Poland's Alpine Escape — Hiking, Zakopane, and What to Know
In the far south of Poland, where the country meets Slovakia, the Tatra Mountains rise abruptly from the rolling Carpathian foothills to form the only genuinely alpine landscape in Central Europe north of the Alps. The Polish Tatras — a 175 square ki...
Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau: What You Need to Know Before You Go
Auschwitz-Birkenau — the network of Nazi German concentration and extermination camps near the Polish town of Oświęcim — was the site of the murder of approximately 1.1 million people, 90% of them Jewish, between 1940 and 1945. Visiting is a solemn a...
Polish Food: The Complete Guide to What to Eat in Poland
Polish food has a reputation problem abroad. Most people know only pierogi and perhaps bigos — and they've usually eaten mediocre versions of both outside Poland. In reality, Polish cuisine is deeply seasonal, regionally varied, and forms the backbon...
Warsaw: The City That Refused to Die — History and What to See
No major European capital suffered more in the Second World War than Warsaw. By January 1945, when Soviet troops entered the city, it was a sea of rubble — 85% of its buildings destroyed, its entire pre-war population of 1.3 million expelled or kille...
Kraków: The Complete Travel Guide to Poland's Royal Capital
Of all the cities in Central Europe, Kraków is arguably the most complete. Warsaw was obliterated and rebuilt. Prague dazzles but floods with tourists. Kraków — Poland's ancient royal capital — survived the Second World War almost entirely intact, le...
Angel Falls and the Tepuis: Venezuela's Natural Wonders Explained
In the Gran Sabana region of southeastern Venezuela, flat-topped mountains called tepuis rise like islands above the surrounding forest — some reaching 3,000 metres, their cliff faces vertical and unbroken, their summits isolated for so long that evo...
Uruguay Vacation Guide: Montevideo, Punta del Este, and the Quiet Coast
Uruguay is the quiet achiever of South America. No dramatic Andes backdrops. No Amazonian wilderness. No baroque colonial epicentres. What Uruguay has is a genuinely functional democracy, beaches that rival the best on the continent, a food culture b...
Suriname: South America's Most Diverse and Least Visited Nation
Suriname is South America's smallest sovereign nation, its only Dutch-speaking country, and one of the continent's most ethnically diverse societies on Earth. It is also one of the most overlooked destinations in a hemisphere full of overlooked desti...
Machu Picchu and the Inca Empire: History, Mysteries, and How to Visit
Nearly 600 years after its construction and 113 years after its re-introduction to the outside world by Hiram Bingham, Machu Picchu remains unexplained in ways that continue to fascinate. Not unexplained in the tabloid sense — the Inca built it, prob...