Lesser Poland rises in steps, and each one is made of a different rock

Most people reach Lesser Poland through Kraków and think of it as the city's province: Kraków and its surroundings. But the region, Małopolska in Polish, covers 15,183 square kilometres and is far more vertical than that idea suggests. It holds Poland's highest point, Rysy, at 2,499 metres, and also a stretch of the Vistula that runs at around two hundred.

Between those two extremes there is no continuous slope, but steps. And what makes this region different is that each one has its own material, its own way of using the land and, in the end, its own people.

01 A floor and two banks

Look at a relief map and the region resembles a long bathtub. Through the middle, from west to east, the Vistula runs along a low, almost flat strip. North of Kraków the ground rises abruptly onto a plateau of white stone. To the south it rises too, but in successive steps: first hills, then wooded mid-height mountains and, at the back, high mountains.

Polish geographers describe it with precise names: Kraków sits where three major landforms meet, the Lesser Poland Upland, the Sandomierz Basin and the Carpathian foothills. For the traveller, what matters is the consequence: in little more than a hundred kilometres from north to south you cross rocks of very different ages and hardness, and the human landscape changes with them.

02 The limestone bank

North of Kraków begins the Kraków-Częstochowa Jura, an Upper Jurassic limestone plateau stretching to the north-west. Limestone dissolves in rainwater, and the result is a landscape of narrow, deep valleys, caves and free-standing rocks left behind as the stone around them dissolved away.

The best place to see it is the Prądnik valley, inside Ojców National Park. It is Poland's smallest national park: it was created in 1956 with 14.4 square kilometres and today covers 21.46. In that small space there are more than four hundred caves, and the stream is fed by some twenty springs that come out of the rock itself.

The best-known rock is Maczuga Herkulesa, Hercules' Club: a limestone column about 25 metres high, wider at the top than at the bottom, still standing because it is made of a harder limestone than the stone that once surrounded it. A few metres away, on another rock, stands the Renaissance castle of Pieskowa Skała.

That pairing of rock and castle is no accident. On a plateau without mountains, free-standing rocks were the only defensible high points, and fortifications were built on them across the whole plateau, many in the time of King Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century. Today a waymarked trail of about 164 kilometres, the Trail of the Eagles' Nests, links Kraków with Częstochowa by way of those rocks. The name says it all: the castles sit where only eagles would nest.

Spending a few days here feels little like the idea of a flat Polish landscape. You walk along the cool floor of a valley, climb a rock and, from the top, see that the plateau is still open farmland, with villages and crops, as if the valleys were cracks in a table.

03 Salt, river and painted houses

Come down from the limestone to the south and you reach the bottom of the bathtub. Here the rock that matters cannot be seen, because it lies underneath: it is salt. Around 13.5 million years ago, in the Miocene, this strip at the foot of the Carpathians was a shallow arm of the sea that gradually closed off and evaporated. What remained were layers of salt that the mountains, as they pushed north, later folded and shoved.

The Wieliczka and Bochnia mines, south-east of Kraków and now a World Heritage Site, were dug into that deposit. For centuries they were one of the region's great sources of wealth. Geological studies also show that the salt layer thickens to the east, from a few tens of metres near Wieliczka to more than two hundred around Tarnów.

Above the salt, the landscape of the floor is the Vistula's: flat, with fertile soils and morning mists. Tarnów, the region's second city, calls itself Poland's 'heat pole'; in March 2024 it recorded 26.4 degrees, a record for that month. The nickname is debatable, since in some years Wrocław, in the west of the country, has recorded higher averages, but it captures the feeling well: down here the climate is milder than on any other step of the region.

On that plain, north of Tarnów, lies Zalipie, a village where the houses, wells, fences and even the beehives are painted with flowers. The custom dates from the late nineteenth century and is kept alive by a yearly competition held since the late 1940s. The house of Felicja Curyłowa, the village's best-known painter, is now a small museum.

Zalipie explains the valley floor better than any statistic. This is farming country, with no stone to hand for building, and houses of whitewashed timber and thatch. Those white walls are exactly what people began to fill with colour.

04 Mountains that look like islands

South of the Vistula the land starts to rise again, and this time it does not stop. First come the Carpathian foothills and then the Beskids, mid-height mountains of forest and meadow. Their rock is completely different from the limestone to the north: it is flysch, alternating layers of sandstone and soft shale laid down on a seabed and later folded.

Flysch erodes unevenly. Where the sandstone is hard, summits remain; where soft rock dominates, broad valleys open up. The best example is the Beskid Wyspowy, the 'Island Beskids': instead of a continuous range, it has separate summits rising four to five hundred metres above the valleys, like islands above the sea. The highest, Mogielica, reaches 1,170 metres.

That shape has a direct effect on people's lives. Because there are open valleys and gentle slopes between one summit and the next, fields and villages climb high here: on the slopes of Jaworz, for example, fields reach about 820 metres. There is no clear line between mountain and farmland, because the farmland runs up into the mountain.

A little further east, in the Nowy Sącz basin and around Łącko, that terrain of sunny slopes filled with orchards. Around 1900 the Łącko area was one of the region's largest fruit-growing centres, mostly plums, and the Apple Blossom Festival has been held there every spring since 1947. Łącko apples have been on the region's list of traditional products since 2005.

In Nowy Sącz, the Sącz Ethnographic Park gathers timber houses from across the area on some twenty hectares and arranges them by group: the Sącz Lachs, the foothill people, the Łącko highlanders, the Lemkos of the higher ground. Walking through it is like seeing the steps in miniature: each group lived at a different height and built in a different way.

05 What comes out of the sandstone

In the far south-east of the region, in the Beskid Sądecki, the Carpathian sandstone holds something else: mineral water naturally charged with gas. In Polish it has its own name, szczawa, and it is why a handful of valleys are home to spa towns such as Krynica-Zdrój, Muszyna, Żegiestów and Piwniczna-Zdrój.

In Krynica the water comes out through 13 springs and 30 boreholes. Some of these waters, known as Zuber type, have a composition that geologists at Kraków's AGH University describe as unique in Europe: they rise from a fault zone where rainwater mixes with very old water coming up from deeper down.

Life in these towns revolves around water: timber pavilions where you drink standing up, walks between wooden villas and the habit of trying several springs in a single day and comparing how they taste. It is a slow, take-the-waters rhythm that resembles neither the castle on its rock nor the farming village on the plain.

06 A river that comes down every step

One thread stitches all these steps together: the Dunajec. It begins at Nowy Targ, where two streams coming down from the Tatras meet, crosses the Podhale plateau, cuts through the Pieniny gorge, passes Stary Sącz and Nowy Sącz, where it takes in the Poprad, and then crosses the foothills, dammed at Rożnów and Czchów, before flowing into the Vistula north of Tarnów. In all it runs for some 247 kilometres.

Following its course is the clearest way to understand the region. Up high, the water runs cold over granite and alpine limestone. In the Pieniny it squeezes between limestone crags. In the Sącz basin it passes between orchards. And in the end it disappears, slow and wide, into the same plain where houses are painted with flowers. It is the same river, but each stretch belongs to a different landscape.

07 What stays with you

Anyone who spends a few days in Lesser Poland without staying only in Kraków tends to come back with a sense of compressed variety. Not because there are many things to see, but because every hour on the road changes the rock under your feet, and with the rock the roofs change, and the crops, and what people drink, and the way they spend time outdoors.

What stays is that logic. When you see a castle on a rock, you know you are on limestone. When you see fields climbing a slope almost to the summit, you know you are on flysch. When you see flowers painted on a white wall, you know you are on the floor, above the salt. And you understand that this region is not a province around a city, but a staircase in which every step has its own way of living.