Poland offers many surprises to travellers leaving the beaten track

By Andreas Heimann Mar 29, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Warsaw - Poland attracts millions of visitors each year and yet many areas of the country remain unknown to foreign travellers.

One reason is that vacationers - including many from neighbouring Germany - keep returning to places they visited before, such as the Baltic Sea coast, the Masuria region and major cities like Warsaw and Krakow.

'There are many undiscovered places on the map,' Jan Wawrzyniak, director of the Polish Tourism Office, commented at the recent international tourism fair ITB in Berlin, where Poland this year was the official partner country.

While Germans, especially those living close to the border with Poland, may know the country well and where to go, say, for a weekend of skiing and snowboarding in the mountains or a getaway break on the Baltic coast, other foreign visitors are a rarity in many regions of Poland.

'Everything that lies beyond Warsaw is scarcely known (to foreigners),' comments Magdalena Korzeniowska, spokeswoman for the Polish Tourism Office. And yet, there is a great deal to discover.

'Lublin, for example, is still undiscovered,' she says. The city in eastern Poland, which before World War II had been dubbed the 'Jewish Oxford,' once had Poland's largest Jewish community and was renowned for its rabbinical scholars.

From early times on Lublin was a multi-cultural city of trade and commerce. The surrounding region is called Lubelski. It's is one of Poland's 16 voivodeships or administrative provinces and is home to the city of Zamosc, which has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Further south is the voivodeship Podkarpackie, the pre-Carpathian region which is certainly not in the category of being swamped by mass tourism. While hiking the forests there, one is more likely to cross paths with a lynx or a wolf than with another vacationer.

And Podlaskie is also a region, in Poland's north-east and close to the border with Belarus, known to few travellers.

'Along with Masuria we are Poland's green lungs,' says Podlaskie voivodeship administrative official Bozena Pogorzelska. 'We have a lot of lakes, a lot of greenery, a lot of nature.'

Podlaskie is considered a paradise by ornithologists. Each spring some 300 species of birds do their nesting in the region.

And what must be some kind of record is the fact that the region is home to four National Parks, including the 'last primeval forest in Europe' which has been declared a World Natural Heritage Site by UNESCO. The area is home to around 470 free-roaming bison as well as elk and wolves.

Poland also has other facets, and is rather stylish at that. 'Poland is also a destination for luxury vacations,' says Magdalena Korzeniowska. On the Baltic Sea coast for example.

'Zoppot has a Sheraton and Gdansk a Hilton,' she notes, referring to two popular destinations, while many hotels in the region boast a full range of wellness offerings.

And Jan Wawrzyniak never tires of stressing that there are unknown sides to Poland which people know even less about than they do about the forests of the country's rugged eastern region.

Warsaw, for example, has long since joined the international-class ranks regarding concerts and the club scene. Young people are often less keen on visiting cultural monuments than they are about the chance of partying the whole night through.

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