Świdnica, then settle in
One compact town centre on the way west, then you stop moving for two days.
Świdnica
55,000 people · a duchy that outlasted the others
Świdnica was the seat of the Duchy of Świdnica-Jawor, the last Silesian principality to keep its independence — Bolko II held out against Bohemian rule until his death in 1368, long after his neighbours had given in. The town grew rich on cloth and on beer: Schweidnitz beer was exported to Kraków, Prague and Buda, and Wrocław's town hall still has the cellar named after it.
What survives is a compact centre with baroque merchant houses around the square, and two very different churches. The Church of Peace is the famous one. The other, the cathedral of St Stanislaus and St Wenceslaus, carries the tallest church tower in Silesia at just over 100 metres — hard to miss, and the reason the skyline looks bigger than the town.
Read more · ŚwidnicaJelenia Góra
Your base · 80,000 people · linen money
Jelenia Góra made its fortune on linen and glass, exporting bleached cloth as far as the Americas in the 18th century. The merchants built the arcaded houses that still line Plac Ratuszowy, and their descendants filled the surrounding valley with so many country palaces that the area is now a protected cultural landscape.
It sits in a basin ringed by mountains — the Karkonosze to the south, the Jizera range to the west — which is why it works so well as a base: almost everything in this corner of Silesia is within an hour. The town itself is a two-hour walk, best done in pieces across your two evenings.
Read more · Jelenia Góra- 10:00
Wrocław Gł. → Świdnica Miasto
1 hBuy on the dayDirect regional train. No early start — this is the whole point of the plan.
- 11:15
Church of Peace
45 minFlat, compactThe largest timber-framed church in Europe, built without a single nail. UNESCO listed. Ten minutes on foot from the station, flat the whole way.
Built in 1656–57 under a peace treaty that let Silesian Protestants have churches only outside the city walls, only of timber, clay and straw, and only within a year. The builders answered with the largest timber-framed church in Europe, seating around 7,500 under a painted ceiling. UNESCO-listed since 2001.
Read more · Churches of Peace - 12:15
Market square and lunch
1 h 30Flat, compactBaroque façades, fountains, and somewhere to eat on the square. Everything within five minutes of everything else.
- 14:00
Świdnica → Jelenia Góra
~2 hBuy on the dayLikely a change at Jaworzyna Śląska or Wałbrzych. Around two hours all in, sitting down. Check it the night before.
- 16:00
Check in · rest
2 hBags down, feet up. From here until Sunday morning you have a room to come back to whenever you want.
- 18:30
Evening on the square
open-endedFlat, compactArcaded Renaissance houses, restaurants, a university-town crowd. Wander as long or as little as you like — you are five minutes from bed.
The arcaded square is the heart of the old town and the reason Jelenia Góra is worth sleeping in rather than passing through. Restaurants under the arches, and a university crowd that keeps it awake.
Read more · Jelenia Góra
Görlitz
Across the border into Germany. Possibly the best-preserved old town in Central Europe.
Görlitz
56,000 people · Germany's easternmost town
Görlitz got rich as a stop on the Via Regia, the trade road running from the Rhine to Kyiv, and its cloth merchants built in whatever style was current — which is why a single street can run from late Gothic through Renaissance and Baroque to Art Nouveau. Then two things happened that almost never happen together: the town escaped Allied bombing almost entirely, and it spent forty years in the GDR with no money to demolish anything. Over 4,000 listed buildings came through.
Restoration after 1990 was funded partly by an anonymous benefactor who has given the town roughly a million marks, then euros, every year since 1995 — the identity is still unknown. The result is a centre that film crews treat as a back lot, hence Görliwood. Beyond the film trail there is the Holy Sepulchre, a 15th-century attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem pilgrimage sites in Saxony, and the house of Jakob Böhme, the shoemaker-mystic whose writings shaped German philosophy.
Read more · GörlitzZgorzelec
Across the river · the same town until 1945
Görlitz and Zgorzelec were one place until the Oder–Neisse line was drawn through it in 1945, handing the eastern bank to Poland and expelling its German population. The Polish side was resettled largely by people displaced from what is now Ukraine, including a large Greek community that arrived after the Greek Civil War.
The two halves have been reconnected since 2004 by a rebuilt footbridge, and the contrast is the point: preserved medieval facades on one bank, postwar rebuilding on the other, ten minutes apart on foot.
Read more · Zgorzelec- 10:00
Jelenia Góra → Görlitz
~1 h 30Buy on the dayDirect trains run from Jelenia Góra. Roughly 1 h 30 — confirm before you commit, it is the one number I could not verify.
- 11:45
Untermarkt
1 h 30Flat, compactThe finest square in town: Renaissance and Baroque façades, arcades, the town hall with its astronomical clock. The station is 15 minutes on foot, all flat.
Görlitz was a wealthy stop on the Via Regia trade route, and the Untermarkt is where the cloth merchants built. The town hall dates from 1369 and carries an astronomical clock; the square is split in two by a block of houses in the middle, which is why it feels like two spaces at once.
Read more · Görlitz - 13:15
Lunch in Zgorzelec
1 h 15Cross the footbridge over the Neisse and you are back in Poland. Restaurants on the Polish bank run 40–60% cheaper than Görlitz. A European border crossed on foot, for lunch.
Görlitz and Zgorzelec were one town until 1945, when the Neisse became the border and the eastern bank went to Poland. Its old town was largely destroyed and rebuilt in socialist-realist style, so the two banks read as two different centuries facing each other across the water.
Read more · Zgorzelec - 14:30
Walk of Görliwood
1 h 30Flat, compactA marked trail of 40 film locations with signage in English. The Art Nouveau department store stood in for the lobby of The Grand Budapest Hotel; Tarantino shot Inglourious Basterds on these squares. Do as much or as little as you like.
Görlitz came through both wars almost untouched and kept more than 4,000 listed buildings spanning late Gothic to Art Nouveau — which is why film crews keep coming. The 1913 department store played the lobby of The Grand Budapest Hotel and was saved from demolition by the shoot; Tarantino filmed Inglourious Basterds on these squares.
Read more · Görlitzer Warenhaus - 16:15
- 18:00
Back to the room
open-endedRest, then a second evening on the Jelenia Góra square whenever you feel like it.
Karpacz, then home
Eighteen minutes into the mountains, back by lunch, in Wrocław mid-afternoon.
Karpacz
4,500 people · under the highest peak of the Sudetes
Karpacz began as a settlement of woodcutters and herb gatherers — the Karkonosze laboranci, who collected mountain plants, brewed them into remedies and sold them across Central Europe for two centuries. Tourism replaced them in the 1800s, when the Prussian middle class discovered the mountains and the village became a resort.
It sits directly under Śnieżka, at 1,603 metres the highest point of the whole Sudetes range and the border with Czechia — the saucer-shaped building on the summit is a meteorological observatory. These mountains are also the home of Rübezahl, called Liczyrzepa or the Spirit of the Mountains in Polish, a capricious giant who rewards the honest and misleads the arrogant, and whose face turns up on half the souvenirs in town.
Read more · Karpacz- 09:15
Breakfast, then check out
45 minCheck-out is usually 11:00 — leave the bags at reception, you come back through Jelenia Góra anyway.
- 10:00
- 10:30
Toy Museum & village centre
1 hFlat, compactThe museum is in the old station building, right beside the new stop. Then the main street — this part of Karpacz is flat.
Karpacz grew from a woodcutters' settlement into Poland's main mountain resort. The museum occupies the 1895 station building, left empty for 25 years after the line closed and reopened as a museum before the trains themselves came back in 2025.
Read more · Karpacz - 11:30
Wang Church (decide on the day)
1 hUphill — check transportA 12th-century Norwegian stave church, moved here in the 19th — the best thing in Karpacz. But it sits about 1.5 km uphill from the centre. There is a local bus and there are taxis; if neither is running, skip it rather than walk it.
Built around 1200 in Vang, Norway, sold in 1841 when the parish wanted something bigger, bought by the King of Prussia and rebuilt here stone by stone in 1842. It is the oldest wooden church in Poland and the only Norwegian stave church outside Scandinavia — assembled with wooden pegs, no nails.
Read more · Vang stave church - 12:45
Karpacz → Jelenia Góra
18 minBuy on the dayCollect the bags. Lunch here before the long leg.
- 14:15
Jelenia Góra → Wrocław
2 hBuy on the dayAbout two hours. The station is 2 km east of the centre — take a taxi rather than walk it with bags.
- 16:30
Home in Wrocław
Back before the day runs out, with an evening in the best city of the trip still ahead of you.
Back to a city of 640,000 with one of the largest medieval market squares in Europe, a cathedral island, and several hundred bronze dwarves hidden around the streets.
Read more · Wrocław