Explore Wrocław

Wrocław Town Hall is a Gothic building in the middle of the Market Square, extended over some 250 years from the late 13th to the mid-16th century, with an astronomical clock and ornate gables on its east front. It houses the City Museum's Museum of Burgher Art, whose rooms include the vaulted Great Hall, and the Świdnicka Cellar.

The Market Square is the medieval main square of Wrocław's Old Town, laid out under Magdeburg law in the early 13th century and measuring 213 by 178 m. Rebuilt burgher houses line its sides around a central block with the Old and New Town Halls; it is a pedestrian zone with cafés, a pillory and the Fredro monument.

St. Elizabeth's Church is a brick Gothic basilica at the north-west corner of Wrocław's Market Square, built in the 14th century; from 1525 to 1946 it was the city's main Lutheran church and it is now the garrison church. Its tower, 91.5 m high, has a viewing terrace with a stone balustrade overlooking the Old Town.

The Museum of the University of Wrocław occupies historic rooms of the university's 18th-century Baroque main building beside the Oder. The route includes the Aula Leopoldina of 1728–1732, a ceremonial hall with illusionist paintings by Johann Christoph Handke, the Oratorium Marianum music hall and the Mathematical Tower, a former observatory with a viewing terrace.

The Racławice Panorama is a cyclorama painting 15 m high and 114 m long, made in Lviv in 1893–1894 by Jan Styka and Wojciech Kossak for the centenary of the 1794 Battle of Racławice. Since 1985 it has hung in a round rotunda in Wrocław, seen from a central platform in 30-minute sessions with recorded commentary.

The National Museum in Wrocław occupies a late Neo-Renaissance building of 1883–1886 by Karl Friedrich Endell, built for the administration of the Province of Silesia beside the Oder. Its permanent galleries show Silesian stone sculpture and art from the 12th to the 19th century, Polish art of the 17th–19th centuries and European art of the 15th–20th centuries.

Wrocław Cathedral, dedicated to St John the Baptist, is a brick Gothic basilica built in the 13th and 14th centuries on Ostrów Tumski, the oldest part of the city, on the site of three earlier churches. Its two towers are 98 m high and one has a viewing terrace; inside are Baroque chapels and the silver high altar of 1591.

Wrocław Zoo opened in 1865 and is the oldest zoo in Poland; rebuilt after the Second World War, it covers 33 hectares beside the Centennial Hall and keeps about 10,500 animals of some 1,100 species. Its Afrykarium, opened in 2014, is an oceanarium of African waters with a walk-through tunnel in the Mozambique Channel tank.

The Centennial Hall is a reinforced-concrete event hall designed by Max Berg and built in 1911–1913; its dome, 67 m across, was the widest concrete span in the world when it opened. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2006, it is visited through the Visitor Centre, a multimedia exhibition on its history, and the interior when no event is on.