Poland » Warsaw

Many people still have an image of Warsaw as a dull concrete jungle, a wasteland of Soviet-era housing with little appeal. The city does undoubtedly have its fair share of problems and whole swathes of its suburbs are indeed dominated by the less-than-imaginative creations of communist-era architects. But there is far more to one of Europe’s most underrated cities, with a string of things to see, an impressive cultural scene and an increasingly lively nightlife.

More than a third of Warsaw’s pre-war population was Jewish, although there are hardly any traces of this heritage remaining, as the city’s prosperous Jewish community was decimated by the end of the war. Much of Warsaw’s historic centre was painstakingly recreated in the years after World War II, in a move by the communist authorities, which surprised the citizens of the city as it much as it did the West. Some churlish critics have dismissed the ‘new’ Old Town as being nothing but an unconvincing fake, although the loss of the original was hardly Warsaw’s fault and many of Europe’s old towns have undergone similar refurbishment and rebuilding.

Somewhat ironically, many of today’s Old Town buildings are closer to the original architecture than they were before destruction, as the alterations of the intervening centuries were not incorporated in the reconstruction. The strikingly successful rebuilding of the Old Town was finally rewarded in 1980, when the entire complex earned its place on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Situated in the Mazowieckie province, in east-central Poland, the city spans the Wisla (Vistula River) and all the main tourist sites are on the left bank, while the right bank contains the increasingly fashionable Praga district.

The tourist epicentre of Warsaw is the ‘Royal Route’, which runs north–south from the New and Old Towns, past the fashionable shops of Nowy Swiat, the palaces that survived the war and the royal gardens of Lazienki Park, before reaching Wilanow Palace to the south of the city centre.