How many days do you need in Poland?
Five days. That is the length of the itinerary we built for Poland, across Kraków and Warsaw.
Here is what each day holds. Every stop below carries its time, and every gap says how to get to the next stop, with the walk or drive time wherever both stops are mapped.
Poland · 5 days Kraków → Warsaw
Best time: May to June or September for warm days, long light, and manageable crowds.
Kraków: Main Market Square and St. Mary’s BasilicaDay 1
🏛️9:00 AMMain Market Square and St. Mary’s Basilica
A 13th-century square 200 meters on a side, with the Cloth Hall at its center. Inside St. Mary’s: Veit Stoss’s vast carved altarpiece. Every hour, a trumpeter plays the hejnał from the tower, and stops mid-note, as tradition demands.
🚶 Old Town on foot
🖼️1:30 PMRynek Underground Museum
An archaeological route four meters beneath the Main Square, medieval market stalls, merchant roads, and a vanished cemetery, excavated in place under glass.
🚶 ~2 min · 🚗 ~1 min · 338 ft
🌆6:00 PMOld Town
The medieval core inside the Planty ring, arcaded townhouses, cellar cafés, and street musicians around the great square until late.
Kraków: Wawel Royal Castle and CathedralDay 2
🏛️9:00 AMWawel Royal Castle and Cathedral
The hill where Polish kings were crowned and buried for five centuries. The cathedral crypts hold monarchs and national heroes; the state rooms hold one of Europe’s great tapestry collections.
🚶 ~20 min · 🚗 ~3 min · 0.7 mi
🥾1:30 PMPlanty Park
A 4-km ring of gardens laid where the medieval walls stood, wrapping the entire Old Town, the local way to get anywhere on foot, under trees.
🚶 ~26 min · 🚗 ~3 min · 0.9 mi
🎟️6:00 PMTraditional food walk
An evening graze through obwarzanek stands, milk-bar pierogi, and Kazimierz’s street-food yards, the fastest way to learn what Poles actually eat and why the milk bars survived communism.
Kraków: Auschwitz-Birkenau MemorialDay 3
🏛️9:00 AMAuschwitz-Birkenau Memorial
The former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp, 70 km west, where about 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered. This is a place of remembrance, not sightseeing: reserve an entry pass well ahead on the official site, free without an educator, though a Memorial educator’s tour is worth it, and give it the full day it asks of you.
🚗 day trip · 33 mi
🌆6:00 PMKazimierz
The historic Jewish quarter, now the city’s evening heart: seven synagogues, candlelit courtyards, klezmer music, and the zapiekanka stalls of Plac Nowy.
Arrive in WarsawDay 4
🚄8:30 AMTrain to Warsaw
Kraków Główny to Warszawa Centralna in about 2h30 on the EIP express, reserved seats only, so book a day ahead on the PKP Intercity app.
🚄 ~2h30 · 157 mi
🏛️2:00 PMOld Town and the Royal Castle
Erased to rubble in 1944, the Old Town was rebuilt brick by brick by 1963, and the castle itself followed in the 1970s and 80s. Walk the Market Square knowing every "medieval" facade is an act of postwar will; the royal apartments were reconstructed down to the salvaged doorframes.
🚶 ~21 min · 🚗 ~3 min · 0.8 mi
🌆6:00 PMNowy Świat and Krakowskie Przedmieście
The Royal Route: palaces, university gates, and Chopin benches that play his music, running from the castle to the cafés and bars where the city spends its evenings.
Warsaw: Palace of Culture and ScienceDay 5
🏛️9:00 AMPalace of Culture and Science
Stalin’s 237-meter "gift" of 1955, loved and loathed in equal measure. The 30th-floor terrace gives the city’s best orientation view, old town one way, new skyline the other.
🚶 ~36 min · 🚗 ~5 min · 1.3 mi
🖼️1:30 PMPOLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
A thousand years of Jewish life in Poland, not only its destruction, told in a landmark building on the site of the former ghetto. Winner of just about every European museum prize.
🚋 Tram hop
🎟️6:00 PMWWII and Uprising history walk
An evening guided walk tracing the ghetto boundary markers and uprising sites embedded in ordinary streets, the layer of the city you will not see without someone pointing at the pavement.
This is how Petrel lays out a trip. Upload your own confirmations and it builds this for your dates: flights and hotels included, with live flight status and the travel time between stops.
This is one of 126 free itineraries. Open it, change anything you want, and it becomes your trip.