Your Guide to Greater Silesia
Foreign travellers putting together their Polish tourist itineraries have a tendency to overlook Katowice and the greater Silesian Metropolis altogether. Sadly, the same goes for most Poles who long ago wrote Katowice off as nothing more than a coal-dust-covered backwater. Oh how wrong they are. The last 10 years or so has seen this historically working-class city emerge from a decades-long post-industrial funk, and Kato is now rapidly becoming one of the most innovative, culturally dynamic and economically vibrant regions in all of Poland. With vast infrastructure and renovations projects underway across the region, Katowice’s future looks even brighter.
Beginning life as a small, German-speaking town called Kattowitz in the early part of the 19th century, Katowice was incorporated within the borders of a new post-WWI Polish state, and thanks to its disparate racial and cultural heritage offers visitors a fascinating jumble of German Gothic, inter-war Art Nouveau and some shockingly different socialist architecture, all intermingled with a growing number of glistening capitalist palaces.
City Essentials