Things to do in Katowice

Neighborhood · Janów-Nikiszowiec, east

A complete red-brick miners' town of 1908–1918, built around interlocking courtyards by the same architects as Giszowiec, and still lived in.

Local tip: Go on a weekday and walk the inner courtyards rather than the perimeter — that is where the estate makes sense. The Sunday market on Plac Wyzwolenia is the real thing, and the Wilson Shaft Gallery a few minutes away is a contemporary art space inside a 1918 mine building.

Culture · On the site of the old Katowice colliery

The NOSPR concert hall, the International Congress Centre with the green valley cut through its roof, and the Silesian Museum sunk underground beneath the surviving pithead.

Local tip: The Silesian Museum put its galleries below ground so the mine buildings could stay standing; you descend into it. NOSPR's acoustics are among the best in Europe and last-minute tickets are cheap by any Western standard.

Landmark · Centre, by Roździeńskiego

The 1971 'flying saucer' arena, an engineering stunt built on unstable post-mining ground and still the city's emblem.

Local tip: It hosted COP24 in 2018 and hosts the Intel Extreme Masters every winter, when the whole centre fills with esports crowds. Worth checking the calendar before booking a hotel in February for anything else.

Nightlife · Śródmieście

A pedestrianised street of bars under a neo-Gothic church, and the compact heart of a night-out in a city with no old town.

Local tip: Katowice has no medieval core to charge tourist prices in, which is exactly why the drinking is cheap and local. Start on Mariacka, then walk to Gliwicka or the Załęże side for the places that have not been discovered.

Nature · Chorzów, between Katowice and Bytom

Six hundred hectares of park built in the 1950s on reclaimed industrial wasteland, with a zoo, a planetarium, an open-air ethnographic museum and a cable car.

Local tip: It is bigger than Hyde Park and Central Park and it is not in Katowice at all — it sits in Chorzów, on the ZTM network. The Elka cable car across it costs a few złoty and is the best way to grasp how completely the region rebuilt its own landscape.

Neighborhood · South-east

A 1907 garden city for miners, laid out as detached cottages with gardens on an English model — half of it demolished in the 1970s for tower blocks.

Local tip: Walk it after Nikiszowiec and the contrast tells the whole twentieth century in one afternoon: paternalist garden suburb, socialist slab blocks, and the surviving cottages now protected. Almost no visitor makes it here.