Lower Silesian Voivodeship — the Sudetes, castles and three UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Lower Silesia covers 19,947 km² in the south-western corner of Poland, against the Czech and German borders. The province splits neatly in two. The north is Oder lowland, with broad forests and old fish-pond country; the south holds the entire Polish share of the Sudetes, running from the Jizera and Karkonosze ranges through the Owl and Table Mountains to the Śnieżnik massif. Between the Oder floodplain and the summit of Śnieżka (1,603 m) lies a kilometre and a half of altitude, which is why one province can hold both flat wetlands and genuine glacial cirques.

Two national parks protect the mountains. Karkonosze National Park, created in 1959, takes in the main ridge with the dome of Śnieżka, the steep glacial corries and a sequence of vegetation zones found nowhere else in Poland except the Tatras; since 1992 it has formed a transboundary biosphere reserve with its Czech counterpart. Table Mountains National Park, established in 1993, protects something entirely different: slabs of Cretaceous sandstone, split by fissures into rock labyrinths. The best known are Szczeliniec Wielki (919 m) and Błędne Skały. Beyond the national parks the region counts 12 landscape parks.

Three sites here carry a UNESCO World Heritage inscription. Two of them are the Churches of Peace at Jawor and Świdnica, listed in 2001. They went up after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, when Silesian Protestants were finally allowed to build — but under deliberately humiliating terms: timber, clay and straw only, no tower, and outside the town walls. The Świdnica church, completed in 1656–1657 to designs by Albrecht von Säbisch, nonetheless became the largest timber-framed Baroque church in Europe, holding around seven and a half thousand people under four tiers of galleries.

The third inscription belongs to Wrocław. The Centennial Hall, built between 1911 and 1913 to a design by Max Berg, was the boldest reinforced-concrete structure in the world when it opened; its ribbed dome spans 67 metres, and UNESCO added it in 2006 as a landmark of twentieth-century architecture. The city offers far more than that, though: Ostrów Tumski with its cathedral, a market square with one of the largest town halls in Central Europe, the rotunda holding the Racławice Panorama, and several hundred bronze dwarfs scattered across the pavements.

Castles and palaces stand unusually thick on the ground here. The largest, Książ near Wałbrzych, is outranked in Poland only by Malbork and Wawel: more than four hundred rooms, terraced gardens, and tunnels driven into the rock during the Second World War that are now open to visitors. Building began in the late thirteenth century under Duke Bolko I, and from 1509 the castle belonged to the Hochberg family for over four centuries. Add the abbey at Krzeszów, the fortresses of Kłodzko and Srebrna Góra, and the working paper mill at Duszniki-Zdrój.

The Sudetes also hold a dense run of spa towns. The Kłodzko Valley alone lines up Kudowa-Zdrój, Polanica-Zdrój, Duszniki-Zdrój and Lądek-Zdrój within a short drive of each other, with Świeradów-Zdrój, Szczawno-Zdrój and Cieplice on the western side of the range. All grew up around mineral springs in the nineteenth century, and all kept their pump rooms, spa parks and promenades — worth a walk today for the architecture as much as the water.