Muszyna — mineral springs, a castle, and a bishops' small state on the Poprad

A state with its own soldiers

Muszyna enters the records in 1209, and it does so over money: Andrew II of Hungary allowed Adolf, a parish priest of the Spiš chapter, to collect tolls on the Poprad near Muszyna. In 1288 Wysz, a scholasticus of the Kraków chapter, bequeathed the settlement to the bishops of Kraków. Town rights on the Magdeburg model came from Casimir the Great in 1356.

Then came the quarrel. After his conflict with Bishop Jan Muskata, King Władysław Łokietek took the estates from the Church and they stayed royal for several decades. On 30 July 1391 Władysław Jagiełło returned the Muszyna key to the Kraków bishopric — two towns and thirty-five villages.

Out of that grew something rare in old Poland: the Muszyna state, an episcopal domain with its own administration, its own courts and its own infantry, known as harnicy. Starostas governed it, the best known of them Stanisław Kempiński. The arrangement lasted until 1781, when the estates passed to the Austrian treasury; Galicia held this district until 1918.

A separate layer is the Lemkos. From the fifteenth century Vlachs and Ruthenians from Transcarpathia and Romanian lands settled these slopes under the Wallachian colonisation. Orthodox, and later Greek Catholic, they left wooden churches in the surrounding villages — the clearest trace of that history in the landscape.

The castle came back

Above the town, on Baszta Hill (527 m), stand the walls of a castle that watched the Polish-Hungarian border and the trade route along the Poprad. The dating is disputed: tradition speaks of a royal foundation in 1301, while other findings point to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, after an older stronghold was destroyed in 1474 during a raid by the forces of Matthias Corvinus. For centuries the castle was the seat of the Muszyna state's starostas.

It still had a defensive role in the seventeenth century. Abandoned in the second half of the eighteenth, it fell into ruin; by some accounts the tower stood until 1908. What it looked like before that is known partly from nineteenth-century drawings by Maciej Bogusz Stęczyński and Napoleon Orda. It entered the heritage register on 30 January 1980.

Between December 2020 and October 2023 the municipality rebuilt the site with EU funding. The tower was raised to fourteen metres, a glazed viewing platform was added on its roof, and an exhibition hall and café went in below. That changed how Muszyna is visited: the climb is now the natural end of a walk through town rather than an expedition to stones in the undergrowth.

Water all over town

Muszyna lies in the middle of an area sometimes called the Poprad balneological basin — the largest zone in Poland for tapping natural mineral water. Within the Poprad Landscape Park sit roughly twenty per cent of the country's mineral water resources, which in practice means it is hard to sink a well in this valley without hitting something charged with carbon dioxide.

Muszyna gained the status of a spa locality around 1930, thanks to the then mayor Antoni Jurczak and Dr Seweryn Mściwujewski; the town joined the association of Polish spa towns the same year. Water was drawn from the "Antoni" spring in Zapopradzie from 1929, and the first two boreholes were sunk in 1932. The second spring is named "Wanda", after the doctor's wife.

For a visitor the point is that the water here is publicly available, and in many places at once: fountains stand at the Anna, Antoni, Grunwald, Józef and Wapienne springs among others, and one is inside the town hall. The listed constituents include magnesium, calcium, sodium, potassium, iron, selenium and lithium. The approved directions of treatment are respiratory and digestive disorders.

Zapopradzie and the old town

The town spreads over two sides of the river: the historic streets on the right bank, and on the left, inside the river bend, the Zapopradzie district with the spa park, gardens and a viewing tower. This is the properly spa-like part, built for walking with no destination in mind.

In the old quarter the finest building is the Baroque fortified church of St Joseph from the seventeenth century, which keeps Gothic sculptures. Two chapels stand on the market square — St John Nepomucene and St Florian — dated between the late seventeenth and the nineteenth century, and burgher houses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries survive on Kościelna Street. There is also a Jewish cemetery, the trace of the pre-war community.

The regional museum of the Polish Tourist Society occupies the starostas' manor complex of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, together with a nineteenth-century inn — that is, the very buildings from which the Muszyna state was run. The town hall sounds the Muszyna bugle call several times a day.

Muszyna also holds an oddity a far bigger town would envy: for fifteen years, from 2003 to 2018, it was the smallest place in Poland with a team in the women's top volleyball league.

The Poprad Landscape Park

The park was created on 11 September 1987 and is among the largest in Poland: 534.19 square kilometres, plus a buffer zone of some 250.63. It takes in the higher parts of the Radziejowa and Jaworzyna ranges, the Poprad gorge between them, and part of the Czerchowskie mountains — running from Krynica and Tylicz in the east to Łącko and Krościenko in the west. The highest summit is Radziejowa (1262 m).

Numbers say more here than adjectives: about a thousand species of flowering plants, nearly half the Polish flora, some five hundred lichens, two hundred and sixty mosses, about four hundred fungi, a hundred and sixty bird species and over sixty butterflies. Forest covers roughly eighty per cent of the area. Wolves, lynx and deer live here, bears pass through, and beavers and otters hold the Dunajec and Poprad valleys.

Thirteen nature reserves lie inside the park and four more in the buffer zone — among them Okopy Konfederackie and the Obrożyska lime forest — along with about a hundred and thirty natural monuments. The curiosities include the mofette on the boundary of Jastrzębik and Złockie, the largest and most productive in Poland, the Devil's Stone below Jaworzyna Krynicka, the Bania cave in the Radziejowa massif, and the mealy primrose, which has its only Polish site on that massif.

Getting there

• By train — the Tarnów to Leluchów line, opened in 1876; Muszyna is a junction, with a branch to Krynica-Zdrój and services towards Nowy Sącz and south into Slovakia.
• By car — up the Poprad valley from Nowy Sącz, or via Krynica-Zdrój, about eleven kilometres away.
• From Slovakia — the border runs some five kilometres from town, which makes Muszyna the natural entry to the Polish part of the Poprad valley.
• Around the district — the wooden churches in the neighbouring villages and the mofette between Jastrzębik and Złockie are best reached by bike or on foot; by car you lose half of this valley.

Worth knowing

Muszyna is small — a little over four thousand four hundred residents on about twenty-four square kilometres — and that is exactly why it rewards walking. A sensible day: the fountains and the market square, then Zapopradzie, and finally the climb to the castle, because from the platform this geography finally makes sense.

Take Muszyna together with Krynica-Zdrój rather than as a smaller version of it. Krynica is the spa on display, with its promenade and architecture; Muszyna is quieter, more scattered and closer to the border, and its strength is water available free in several places at once. What is open and which treatments run changes through the year, so check the details at source.

How to get there and practical info

Location

a bend of the Poprad in the Beskid Sądecki, Lesser Poland voivodeship, Nowy Sącz county; about 450 metres above sea level, some 5 km from the Slovak border

What it is

a spa locality with status going back to around 1930; town rights since 1356

Healing resources

mineral waters from numerous intakes, containing magnesium, calcium, sodium, potassium, iron, selenium and lithium

Main directions of treatment

respiratory and digestive disorders

Drinking fountains

publicly accessible points at the Anna, Antoni, Grunwald, Józef and Wapienne springs, plus one inside the town hall

Castle on Baszta Hill

527 metres above sea level; rebuilt from December 2020 to October 2023, the tower raised to 14 metres with a glazed viewing platform on its roof

Around the town

the Poprad Landscape Park of 1987 (534.19 km²), the wooden churches of nearby villages, the mofette between Jastrzębik and Złockie

Current opening and tickets

official site of the town and municipality of Muszyna

When to go