5 Days in Gdańsk

When a Polish king visited Gdańsk, he came in from the west through the Upland Gate, passed the Foregate, went under the Golden Gate and rode down Długa (Long Street) and Długi Targ (Long Market) to the Green Gate on the river. That's the Royal Route, and it's still the best way into the city. Walk it slowly, the way the kings did. Before you start, look at the Great Armoury on Targ Węglowy, just north of the Upland Gate, a Flemish-style arsenal from 1605 that is the finest building of its age in the city, and behind it the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, opened in 2014 with a roof that opens to the sky, on the site of a 17th-century theater where English actors played.

The houses lining it are tall and narrow, with stepped gables, painted facades and stone terraces at the front, built on the thin plots the medieval town was divided into. Almost all of them are postwar reconstructions. In 1945 this street was a burned-out shell, and the architects who rebuilt it chose to bring back the city of the 16th and 17th centuries, Gdańsk's golden age, rather than the 19th-century Prussian look it had before the war. Look closely and you'll see the details they got right, and a few they got creatively wrong.

Halfway down Długa, the Main Town Hall's slim tower, topped by a gilded figure of King Sigismund Augustus, is the tallest thing on the Royal Route. Inside is the main branch of the Museum of Gdańsk, and the room to see is the Red Hall, where the city council met under a ceiling painted around 1600 that celebrate Gdańsk's wealth and good government as much as its loyalty to Poland. It was taken down and hidden during the war, which is why it survived when the building didn't.

Upstairs, the rooms about the Free City of Danzig and the photographs of the town hall in ruins in 1945 explain the rest of what you'll see this week.

The Long Market opens up just past the Town Hall, and in the middle of it stands Neptune, the city's emblem since the bronze statue was cast in 1615 and set on its fountain in 1633. Locals still arrange to meet "under Neptune". The legend says the god got so angry at people throwing coins into his fountain that he struck the water with his trident and turned the coins into the gold flakes you'll find in Goldwasser, the city's old liqueur.

Behind him is Artus Court, where Gdańsk's merchants met, drank and did business, in a Gothic hall full of ship models and paintings. Find the tiled stove in the corner, about 11 m high and one of the largest in Europe.

For lunch, do what Gdańsk office workers do and go to a bar mleczny, a milk bar. These canteens were set up to feed workers cheaply under communism, and the best survivors still serve home cooking for a few euros: pierogi, żurek (sour rye soup), kotlet schabowy (breaded pork cutlet) with potatoes and cabbage, placki ziemniaczane (potato pancakes) and cups of barszcz (beetroot soup).

Bar Neptun, a family-run milk bar on Długa, right on the Royal Route, has been feeding people for more than 30 years, and Bar Mleczny Turystyczny on Szeroka, a few streets north, has been open since 1956. You order at the counter from a board on the wall, carry your own tray and clear it afterwards.

A block north of Długa stands St. Mary's Basilica, and it's enormous: it took about 150 years to build, until 1502, and it's one of the three largest brick churches in the world. Up to 25,000 people can fit inside. The church was Lutheran for four centuries, but Gdańsk's Lutherans kept its Catholic altars and treasures. The white, almost bare interior you see now is the result of 1945, when fire destroyed the roof and vaults, and of the decades after, when much of what had been evacuated stayed elsewhere.

Look for the astronomical clock from the 1460s, whose figures parade every day at 11:57, and the copy of Hans Memling's Last Judgment, whose original is in the National Museum. Then climb the tower, roughly 400 steps up a narrow stair, for the best view in Gdańsk: the red roofs of the Main Town, the river, the cranes of the shipyard and, on a clear day, the Baltic.

From the church's east end, Mariacka Street runs down to the river, and it's the most beautiful street in the city: stone terraces in front of every house, gargoyle drainpipes shaped like dragons and lions, and amber shops in almost every doorway. Gdańsk has worked Baltic amber, fossilized tree resin, 40 to 50 million years old, that washes up on the beaches after storms, since the Middle Ages and calls itself the world capital of amber.

If you want to buy, buy here or in a shop with a certificate of the International Amber Association, not from street stalls, where plastic and pressed amber are common. Come back after dark too, when the street is empty and lit by lanterns.

Mariacka comes out through a gate onto the Long Riverfront (Długie Pobrzeże), the old quay along the Motława, and a short walk north is the Crane (Żuraw), the symbol of the port. It's a 15th-century gate tower with a wooden hoist inside, worked by men walking in two huge treadwheels, that loaded ships and raised masts. It reopened in 2024 after two years of restoration, with an exhibition inside run by the National Maritime Museum.

In the evening the quay fills up with people walking, eating and looking across at Granary Island. Skip the restaurants with touts on the waterfront and eat a street or two back. For a first dinner, order pierogi and śledź, herring in oil or cream, and a glass of cold vodka with it.

The leaning red tower on the river north of the Main Town is the Museum of the Second World War, opened in 2017 and one of the most important museums in Europe. Most of it is underground, and it tells the war through civilians as much as soldiers: the terror of occupation, the camps, the destruction of Warsaw, collaboration and resistance, and what war did to ordinary people in every country it touched.

It's huge and intense, so pace yourself. Many visitors find the reconstructed street that you walk through three times, before the war, under occupation and after liberation, the part that stays with them longest.

On 1 September 1939 the Polish Post Office in the Free City of Danzig was one of the few pieces of Poland inside the city, and 56 people, postal workers, some of them armed, along with the caretaker's wife and their ten-year-old daughter, held it for about 15 hours against the German police and SS. When it was set on fire, they surrendered. Four escaped. On 5 October 1939, 38 of the defenders were shot after a German court-martial, a verdict a German court overturned only in 1998.

The building is a museum about the defense and the Polish community in the Free City, reopened in October 2026 with a new, larger exhibition that isn't suitable for young children. Günter Grass, who grew up in Danzig, put the siege into The Tin Drum, and the monument in the square outside shows a dying postman handing his rifle to the goddess of victory.

For lunch, walk five minutes north to Montownia, a food hall in the shipyard hall where U-boats were assembled during World War II. It has 19 kitchens and two bars under one roof, Polish and from around the world. Bus 106 to Westerplatte leaves from the WWII Museum stop, around the corner.

Westerplatte is a spit of land at the harbor mouth where Poland was allowed to keep a small military depot inside the Free City. At 4:45am on 1 September 1939 (4:48, to be precise) the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, in port on a "courtesy visit", opened fire on it, and those shots are usually counted as the start of World War II. The garrison of a little over 200 men was expected to hold for twelve hours and held for seven days. Historians still argue about who really led the defense, the commander, Major Sucharski, or his deputy, Captain Dąbrowski. The bombing of the bridges at Tczew, a few minutes earlier, is the other candidate for the first shots of the war.

Today there are ruined barracks, a guardhouse, the soldiers' cemetery and the 25 m Westerplatte Monument on its mound. A large museum is being built on the site, and until 2030 parts of it are fenced off. A small exhibition in the old power station and the visitor center are open, and Guardhouse No. 1 from April to September, so go for the monument, the ruins and the quiet.

Back in town, Piwna (Beer Street) and the lanes around St. Mary's are where Gdańsk goes for a drink. After a day like this one, do it the Polish way: Pijalnia Wódki i Piwa, a vodka-and-beer bar on Długi Targ (enter from Kuśnierska), serves a shot of cold vodka with a small plate of herring, pickles or tartare for under 10 złoty each. Try wiśniówka, the sweet sour cherry liqueur, too.

For a proper dinner, Piwna47, on Piwna itself, cooks hearty Pomeranian food from local produce and is in the Michelin Guide. Book a table on a Friday or Saturday.

Start at Hala Targowa, the market hall from 1896, which reopened in August 2026 after a long rebuild as a food hall, with street food stands and a café on the ground floor and restaurants upstairs. Go down to the lower floor, where food shops sell bread, cheese, sausage and smoked fish, and where the foundations of a 12th-century church and a medieval lime kiln, found under the hall, are on show behind glass. It's a good place for breakfast and a coffee.

Next door is the Dominican St. Nicholas Church, one of the few medieval churches in the center that came through 1945 almost undamaged, with its old altars and furnishings intact.

Across the canal, the Great Mill, built by the Teutonic Knights in the 14th century, ground grain on the Radunia canal until 1945. Since 2021 it has housed the Amber Museum of the Museum of Gdańsk. It explains where amber comes from, how it trapped insects and plants tens of millions of years ago, and how Gdańsk's craftsmen turned it into everything from altars to tankards.

Right behind the mill are two brick churches. St. Catherine's is the oldest parish church in Gdańsk, and the astronomer Johannes Hevelius, who mapped the Moon from his rooftop observatory nearby, is buried inside. St. Bridget's next door was the church of the shipyard workers in the 1980s. Its huge altar is made of amber, still a work in progress, and the church is full of Solidarity memorials. Its priest of those years, Henryk Jankowski, was later accused of sexually abusing minors, and his statue outside was pulled down by activists in 2019 and then removed.

Ten minutes' walk north brings you to the Gdańsk Shipyard and its Gate No. 2. In August 1980 the workers went on strike here after the crane operator Anna Walentynowicz was fired, months before she was due to retire. An electrician named Lech Wałęsa, who had been fired himself in 1976, climbed over the fence, by his own account, to lead it, and the strike spread along the coast and across Poland. The workers hung their 21 demands on the gate, and on 31 August the government signed an agreement allowing the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc: Solidarity.

In front of the gate stand three steel crosses 42 m tall, with anchors. They remember the workers shot by the army and police in December 1970, and the strikers in 1980 made building this monument one of their demands. It went up that same December.

Behind the gate rises the rust-colored steel of the European Solidarity Centre, opened in 2014. Its permanent exhibition tells the story from the 1970 massacre to the round table talks and the elections of 1989, with the original plywood boards with the 21 demands and a lot of the everyday detail of life in communist Poland. It's well done and moving, even if you know the outline.

A second exhibition, The Shipyard, tells the story of the yard itself, and a short walk away is the BHP Hall, the health-and-safety building where the strikers met and the August agreement was signed. Go up to the roof terrace afterwards for a view over the shipyard. A few of its cranes still work, and the rest of the yard is slowly turning into a new district of apartments, offices and clubs.

The old shipyard sheds have become Gdańsk's best place to go out. Ulica Elektryków ("Electricians' Street", Wałęsa's old trade) is an outdoor venue for concerts, club nights and street food from May to late September, and clubs like B90 and Drizzly Grizzly put on concerts and DJ nights in former shipyard halls on the same street all year.

For dinner, the restaurants of the Main Town are a ten-minute walk south.

Oliwa was a Cistercian abbey long before it became a suburb of Gdańsk, and its long, narrow cathedral is the main reason to stop. The organ, built for the monks in 1763-88, has thousands of pipes and a famous trick: when it plays, carved angels blow trumpets and ring bells, and stars and suns turn on the case. Short organ demonstrations of about 20 minutes are held every day, several times a day in summer and at least once a day the rest of the year. The doors close when the music starts, so arrive early.

Afterwards, walk through Oliwa Park behind the cathedral, the abbots' old garden, with a grotto that locals call the whispering cave, because a word whispered into one corner can be heard in the other.

From Oliwa, a short taxi or bus ride takes you to the beach at the southern end of Sopot. Have lunch there, Baltic fish by the sea: Bar Przystań, a fish restaurant on the beach at the southern end of Sopot, has been the locals' favorite for more than 25 years: you order at the counter, pick fried flounder, cod or salmon by weight, and eat it with fries and a beer looking at the sea. Have the fish soup too.

After lunch, walk north along the beach to the pier, about 20 minutes. Sopot became a fashionable spa resort in the 19th century, and between the wars, as part of the Free City, it had a casino that drew gamblers from all over Europe. It's still the Tricity's playground. The Sopot Pier, just over 500 m long, is the longest wooden pier in Europe, and walking to the end of it is what you do in Sopot.

Back on land, the grand old Grand Hotel stands next to the pier, and the beach runs for kilometers in both directions, south through Gdańsk's own beaches at Jelitkowo and Brzeźno, which the trams reach. In summer it's packed. Out of season it's one of the nicest walks on the Baltic.

From the pier, Monte Cassino Street, Monciak to everyone, climbs back into town. It's Sopot's pedestrian main street, lined with cafés, bars and villas, and halfway up is the Crooked House (Krzywy Domek), a shopping center from 2004 whose facade looks like it's melting, inspired by fairy tale drawings. It's silly, everyone photographs it, and so will you.

Walk north from the pier along the beach or the promenade behind it. In about an hour you reach Orłowo, with its own small pier and the cliff of Redłowo rising behind the beach, where the forest runs right down to the sea. It's the walk locals take on a sunny weekend, and it's far quieter than Sopot. From Orłowo, it's a short bus or SKM ride into the center of Gdynia.

Gdynia is the newest of the three cities and the opposite of Gdańsk. In 1920 it was a village and small seaside resort. Then Poland, which had a strip of coast but no port it controlled, built one here, and by 1939 Gdynia was a city of over 120,000 people, built almost entirely in the modernist style of the 1930s. The white, rounded buildings on Świętojańska street and around Kościuszko Square are some of the best in Europe, and in July 2026, the city's centenary year, UNESCO put the modernist center on its World Heritage list.

At the end of the pier, the 1909 sailing ship Dar Pomorza and the World War II destroyer ORP Błyskawica are moored as museums, open until late afternoon. Then climb Kamienna Góra, the hill behind the center, for the sunset over the bay, and have dinner in town before the train back.

The Teutonic Knights came to this region in the 13th century to convert the pagan Prussians by force, and in 1309 they moved their headquarters to Marienburg, today's Malbork. Over the next century they turned it into what is usually called the largest brick castle in the world, three castles in one, from which they ran a state that stretched along the Baltic. In 1410 Poland and Lithuania crushed them at Grunwald, though Malbork itself held out against the siege that followed, and in 1457 the unpaid mercenaries holding Malbork sold it to the Polish king. It was a royal residence until the Prussian partition in 1772.

The castle was badly damaged in 1945, and the restoration, like Gdańsk's, is part of its story. Inside, the Grand Master's palace, the Grand Refectory with its palm-tree vaults, and the amber collection are the highlights. The audio guide is excellent and takes about three hours.

There are a few restaurants and cafés along the river below the castle, good for a bowl of żurek or pierogi before the train back. Walk across the footbridge over the Nogat for the classic view of the whole castle reflected in the water. It's the best photograph of the day.

Back in Gdańsk, walk across Granary Island (Wyspa Spichrzów), where the city kept the Polish grain it shipped to the rest of Europe. Its granaries burned in 1945 and stood as ruins for decades, and the quarter has only recently been rebuilt with hotels and restaurants. Then cross to Ołowianka, just north of it, where the Polish Baltic Philharmonic plays in an old power station and the Sołdek, the first ship built in postwar Poland, is moored as part of the National Maritime Museum. Next to it turns AmberSky, a new 60 m Ferris wheel that replaced the old one in May 2026 (about 10 EUR, 42 złoty), which gives you a last view over the roofs of the Main Town, St. Mary's and the Crane at dusk.

For the last night, book a table for modern Polish or Kashubian food: duck or goose, smoked fish, pierogi with unusual fillings, and in season the region's famous strawberries. Tygle on Granary Island, MDWA, a tiny tasting-menu restaurant whose chef cooks from his Kashubian roots, and Kubicki, open since 1918 and the oldest restaurant in town, are three good choices.

End with a glass of Goldwasser, the herbal liqueur with flakes of real gold floating in it. It was first made in Gdańsk around 1600, and the Goldwasser restaurant on the Long Riverfront still serves it, though since 2009 the drink itself has been made only in Germany.