5 Days in Warsaw

Start on Castle Square, where Warsaw arranges to meet "under the column". On top of Sigismund's Column, put up in 1644, stands King Sigismund III Vasa, the man who moved the royal court from Kraków to Warsaw around 1596 and made it the capital. Polish kings were still crowned and buried in Kraków, but from then on they lived here.

In September 1944 a German tank shot the column down. The statue was badly damaged but saved, and pieces of the old shafts, the red marble original and its 19th-century granite replacement, still lie on the ground by the castle wall. Look for them: it's the first of many places this week where the city shows you its scars on purpose.

The Royal Castle was the home of the Polish kings and the seat of parliament, and in 1791 the Constitution of 3 May, Europe's first modern written constitution, was passed in its Senate hall. The Germans burned it in 1939 and blew it up in 1944. It was rebuilt from 1971 to 1984, largely with money Poles at home and abroad gave themselves, and museum staff had smuggled out furniture, paintings and even pieces of the walls before it was destroyed.

Inside, the Canaletto Room is the one not to miss: 22 views of 18th-century Warsaw by Bernardo Bellotto, the nephew of the Venetian painter, who signed himself Canaletto too. After the war the architects used these paintings, alongside pre-war measurements and photographs, to rebuild the Old Town. The castle also has two Rembrandts.

A few minutes north is the Old Town Market Square, with its colored burghers' houses and the statue of the Warsaw Mermaid, the city's symbol, in the middle. It looks medieval. It was finished in the 1950s. Architects, students and volunteers rebuilt the whole Old Town, most of it between 1947 and the mid-1950s, using pre-war measurements, Bellotto's paintings and photographs, and UNESCO put it on its list in 1980 for exactly that: as one of the best reconstructions in history.

The Museum of Warsaw, in eleven houses on the north side of the square, tells the city's story through objects and has a viewing platform over the roofs. Start with the rooms on the destruction and rebuilding, and everything you see this week makes more sense. It closes at 5pm on most days.

Walk out through the Barbican, the red-brick gate in the old city walls, onto Freta, the main street of the New Town (new in the 15th century). Five minutes west, on Krasiński Square, stands the Warsaw Uprising Monument, unveiled on 1 August 1989: bronze insurgents bursting out of a collapsing building and others climbing down into a sewer, the way many escaped in 1944. On the way back you'll pass the Little Insurgent, a boy in a helmet too big for him, by the Old Town walls. Freta is quieter and more local than the square, and a good place for lunch, at Zapiecek's pierogi shops or the cheap Mleczarnia Jerozolimska milk bar: pierogi filled with potato and cheese, meat or mushrooms and cabbage, or a bowl of żurek, sour rye soup with sausage and egg.

At Freta 16 is the house where Maria Skłodowska, later Marie Curie, was born in 1867, now a small museum to the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences.

Back past Castle Square, the bell tower of St. Anne's Church is the best viewpoint over the Old Town. About 150 steps take you up to a terrace with the castle, the roofs of the Old Town and the Vistula below you, and Praga across the river.

Then walk down the old steps from the church to the riverbank, or along the escarpment to the terrace on Gnojna Góra, at the back of the Old Town, where the view over the river is free.

Fryderyk Chopin grew up in Warsaw and left it at 20, in 1830, never to return. You'll hear his music everywhere, and the easiest way to hear it properly is one of the small recitals held almost every evening in the Old Town and around the center, an hour of nocturnes, mazurkas and polonaises played on a grand piano.

Have dinner afterwards in one of the Old Town's cellar restaurants, and order something Varsovian: flaki, a peppery tripe soup that the city claims as its own, or a plate of herring in oil with a glass of cold vodka.

Krakowskie Przedmieście is Warsaw's most elegant street, lined with churches, palaces and the gates of the University of Warsaw. Walk it slowly. You pass the Presidential Palace, where the Warsaw Pact was signed in 1955 and where the government and Solidarity sat down at the Round Table in 1989, the Bristol hotel, and the statues of the poet Adam Mickiewicz and of Copernicus in front of the Staszic Palace.

A short detour west takes you to Piłsudski Square and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the only part of the Saxon Palace that the Germans didn't blow up in 1944. The palace itself is due to be rebuilt around it, and the square is partly fenced off for archaeological digs, but the guard still changes every hour. In June 1979 Pope John Paul II said Mass on this square in front of hundreds of thousands of people and prayed for the Spirit to "renew the face of the earth, this earth". Many Poles date the end of communism from that day.

Across from the university is the Church of the Holy Cross, and in its left pillar, behind a plaque, is the heart of Fryderyk Chopin. He died in Paris in 1849 and asked for his heart to be taken home. His sister Ludwika smuggled it into Russian-ruled Warsaw in 1850, in a jar of alcohol (cognac, the story goes) hidden under her skirts. In 1944 it was handed to a German officer, who gave it to the archbishop, and it came back to the church in October 1945.

It's a small, strangely moving place, and you'll usually find flowers in front of the pillar.

Krakowskie Przedmieście becomes Nowy Świat ("New World"), a street of low, rebuilt classical houses full of cafés. At number 33 is A. Blikle, a pastry shop open since 1869, famous for its pączki, Polish doughnuts filled with rose jam, which Charles de Gaulle is said to have liked. Have one with a coffee, or try a wuzetka, Warsaw's own chocolate cream cake.

At the end of the Royal Route is Łazienki, the summer residence of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. He turned an old bathhouse (łazienki means baths) into the Palace on the Isle, a small neoclassical palace sitting in the middle of a lake, and filled the park around it with pavilions, an orangery and an amphitheater on the water. He lost his throne when Russia, Prussia and Austria divided Poland among themselves in 1795.

Inside the palace, the ballroom and the king's picture gallery are worth the ticket. The park's buildings are closed on Mondays. Then just wander: the park is the city's favorite, with red squirrels that eat from your hand and peacocks screaming in the trees.

In the upper part of the park stands the Chopin Monument, the composer sitting under a willow bent by the wind, made in 1926. The Germans cut it up and melted it down in 1940, and the copy you see went up in 1958. Every summer Sunday since 1959, pianists play free Chopin concerts at its foot, at noon and 4pm, to thousands of people sitting on the grass.

If you're not here on a summer Sunday, come for the monument anyway, then walk back out past the Belweder palace.

Take a short bus or taxi ride to Plac Zbawiciela, a round square of tall 1900s tenements around the Church of the Holiest Savior and the center of young Warsaw's social life. The streets around it, Mokotowska, Koszykowa and Hoża, are full of good restaurants and bars. Five minutes north along Marszałkowska is Plac Konstytucji, the heart of MDM, a district built in 1950-52 in the grand socialist realist style, with giant stone workers on the facades. And a ten-minute walk west, Hala Koszyki, a restored 1900s market hall, has two dozen kitchens and bars under one roof and is busy every night.

Before World War II, one in three people in Warsaw was Jewish, and Poland had the largest Jewish community in Europe. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews tells their thousand years here, not just their destruction. The core exhibition is one of the best museums in Europe: a painted wooden synagogue ceiling, a market street, the arguments of the interwar years, and then the Holocaust, told without drama and all the more powerful for it.

The museum stands in the middle of what was the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Germans walled in more than 400,000 people from 1940. In front of it is the Ghetto Heroes Monument, to the fighters of the Ghetto Uprising, which began on 19 April 1943 under Mordechai Anielewicz (every 19 April, Varsovians wear paper daffodils in their memory). Anielewicz died in the bunker at Miła 18, now a mound a five-minute walk away. In front of the monument, in 1970, the West German chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees, an unplanned gesture that became one of the images of the century.

Ten minutes' walk north, on Stawki street, is the Umschlagplatz memorial, a white marble wall on the spot where, from July to September 1942, some 265,000 Jews from the ghetto were loaded onto trains to the gas chambers of Treblinka. The names carved on it are 400 common Jewish first names.

Little of the ghetto survives. Nożyk Synagogue on Twarda street, from 1902, is the only prewar synagogue left in Warsaw, and Próżna street next to it still has a row of prewar tenements. The best-known surviving piece of the ghetto wall, with bricks taken by Israeli and American museums, is in a courtyard between Sienna 55 and Złota 62 in the center, near the Palace of Culture, and you'll pass close to it this evening.

On the way south, walk past the two red-brick market halls of Mirów, built around 1900, burned in the Uprising, when German troops shot hundreds of civilians inside them, and rebuilt after the war. Hala Mirowska is still a real market, with stalls of vegetables, meat and flowers around it.

Ten minutes further, on the way to the next museum, Browary Warszawskie is an old brewery turned into a quarter of apartments, offices and restaurants. Its food hall, in the brewery's former lagering cellars, has stalls from pierogi and zapiekanki (toasted open baguettes) to Vietnamese phở. Poland's Vietnamese community is its largest from outside Europe, and most of it lives in Warsaw. Browar Warszawski, the brewpub next door, brews beer on the site again.

On 1 August 1944, at 5pm, the Polish Home Army rose against the German occupation, hoping to free Warsaw before the Red Army, by then on the other side of the Vistula, arrived. The Soviets halted on the east bank and gave almost no help. In the first week, from 5 August, German units murdered 40,000 to 50,000 civilians in this district, Wola, street by street. The insurgents held out for 63 days, until 2 October, and around 150,000 to 200,000 civilians and some 15,000 fighters died. After the surrender, the Germans expelled the survivors and blew up what was left of the city.

The Warsaw Rising Museum, in an old tram power station, is loud, crowded and full of sound, a little like being inside the uprising itself. Don't miss the replica B-24 Liberator bomber, the sewers you can crawl through, and City of Ruins, a short 3D flight over the destroyed city in 1945 that leaves most people silent.

The Palace of Culture and Science was Stalin's "gift" to the Polish people, built largely by Soviet workers in 1952-55 and named after him until 1956. At 237 m with its spire, it was the tallest building in Poland for decades, and Varsovians have been arguing about it ever since: tear it down, keep it, love it. The old joke says the best view of Warsaw is from its terrace, because it's the only place you can't see it from.

The terrace on the 30th floor is open until 8pm, so from autumn to spring you can catch the sunset from it. For the modern answer, the Highline on the 53rd floor of the Varso Tower next door, opened in 2025, is the highest viewpoint in the EU, at about 230 m, and is open until 10pm. Inside the Palace, the Neon Museum's collection of communist-era shop signs is worth a look before it closes, and at the foot of it stands the new white Museum of Modern Art, opened in 2024.

Start in Powiśle, the neighborhood below the escarpment by the river, at the University of Warsaw Library, a 1999 building with copper-green walls and a garden on its roof. Paths, bridges and terraces wind through the plants, with views over the river and the Świętokrzyski Bridge, and from April to October it's one of the nicest free places in the city.

Next door is the Copernicus Science Centre, a big hands-on science museum that's a good choice if you're traveling with children. Book it ahead.

The pedestrian and cycle bridge across the Vistula, named after the sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, opened in 2024 and was an instant hit: 452 m long, with wide wooden decks where people stop to look at the river, the skyline and the wild, sandy east bank, where the forest comes right down to the water. Few European capitals have a river this untamed running through the middle.

Praga's specialty is pyzy, big potato dumplings stuffed with meat and covered in fried bacon, traditionally sold from jars at the Różycki Bazaar on Targowa street. The bazaar, Warsaw's oldest, has been partly rebuilt, and you can still get pyzy and flaki, Warsaw-style tripe soup, at small, cheap places nearby, like Pyzy Flaki Gorące on Brzeska street, the kind of meal Praga's market traders have been eating for a century.

Walk along Ząbkowska and the streets around it, where Praga still looks like pre-war Warsaw: tall tenements with crumbling plaster, courtyards with little shrines to the Virgin Mary put up by residents during the war, and street art on the side walls. The onion domes on Aleja Solidarności belong to the Orthodox Cathedral of St. Mary Magdalene, from the 1860s, when Warsaw was ruled by Russia.

The Museum of Praga, in a row of old tenements on Targowa, tells the district's story, including its prayer house and its reputation as Warsaw's tough side. Roman Polanski filmed parts of The Pianist here because it looked so much like the vanished city. Praga is changing fast, but it's still rough in places, so stay on the main streets after dark.

At the end of Ząbkowska is Koneser, a red-brick vodka distillery from the 1890s that has been turned into a quarter of restaurants, bars, offices and apartments. In the old rectification building is the Polish Vodka Museum, where an hour-long tour explains how Poles have made vodka since the Middle Ages, from rye and potatoes, and ends with a 20-minute tasting that teaches you how to drink it properly: cold, neat, in one go, with food.

Afterwards, have a drink in one of Koneser's courtyards, or try the bars around Ząbkowska, where Praga's nightlife started in the 2000s.

Back across the river, the Vistula Boulevards run for several kilometers along the left bank, under the Old Town and through Powiśle. Below the Old Town stands the bronze Mermaid (Syrenka), the city's symbol, sword raised over the river. From spring to autumn this is where Warsaw spends its evenings: bars on floating pontoons, people sitting on the steps by the water, and the lights of the bridges coming on.

If it's too cold for the river, head up to Elektrownia Powiśle, a 1900s power station turned into a food hall and shopping arcade, or to the bars and clubs around Nowy Świat and Mazowiecka street.

Wilanów Palace was the summer home of Jan III Sobieski, the king who led the army that broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. He built it from 1677 as a country manor and kept enlarging it into a baroque palace, decorated with scenes from his own victories and from Roman history, in which he looks suspiciously like the heroes. It's one of the few royal buildings in Poland that wasn't destroyed in the war, though the Germans looted it.

Inside, the royal apartments and the portrait gallery are the highlights. Behind the palace, the formal baroque garden runs down to a lake, with an English park and a Chinese garden around it.

Before heading back, have coffee and cake at one of the cafés by the palace gate. The cake to try in Warsaw is the wuzetka, two layers of chocolate sponge with whipped cream and a chocolate glaze, probably named after the W-Z, the East-West road opened in 1949. In 2009 the city also chose an official dessert, the zygmuntówka, an almond cake with chocolate mousse, cranberry jam and a meringue crown, but it's hard to find, so grab it if you see it.

Back in the center, the National Museum has the greatest collection of Polish painting. Its star is Jan Matejko's Battle of Grunwald, a canvas about 10 m wide showing the Polish-Lithuanian victory over the Teutonic Knights in 1410, so important to Poles that it was hidden from the Germans near Lublin throughout the war. Look also for the Faras Gallery, wall paintings saved from a Nubian cathedral in Sudan before the Aswan dam flooded it, and the gallery of Polish design and posters.

For the last night, book a table at one of the places doing modern Polish food, which Warsaw does better than anywhere else in the country: duck with beetroot, sour cream and dill on everything, river fish, wild mushrooms and inventive pierogi. Wandal, the Michelin Guide's opening of the year in 2026, Wyraj in Browary Warszawskie and Rozbrat 20, which has a star, are three good choices. Book ahead.

Then end the night the old way, in a pijalnia wódki i piwa, a vodka-and-beer bar around Nowy Świat, where a shot of cold vodka comes with a small plate of herring, pickles or tartare for around 10 złoty each. Say na zdrowie and look people in the eye.