Lublin Voivodeship — borderland towns, marshes and limestone hills between the Vistula and the Bug.

Lublin Voivodeship covers 25,122 km², which makes it the third largest of Poland's sixteen provinces. It lies entirely east of the Vistula, and its eastern edge is drawn by the Bug — a river that has long marked a meeting point of cultures rather than a barrier. The land is far more varied than the phrase „eastern plains” suggests: marshes and shallow lakes in the north, a rolling upland cut by loess ravines in the middle, and the limestone ridge of Roztocze running south-east across the border.

The regional capital is Lublin, the city where the Polish-Lithuanian Union was signed in 1569. Its castle holds the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, whose Byzantine-Ruthenian frescoes were commissioned by King Władysław Jagiełło and completed in 1418 — one of the finest surviving ensembles of medieval painting in this part of Europe. Lublin's historic centre carries the national status of Monument of History, granted in 2007, and it is far less crowded than Kraków.

The region's other famous town is Zamość, founded in 1580 by Chancellor Jan Zamoyski and laid out by the Italian architect Bernardo Morando as an „ideal city”. The Renaissance street grid, the arcaded merchant houses and the ring of fortifications all survive, and the Old Town was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992. Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula has a completely different mood: a small artists' town surrounded by loess gorges, with a hill of three crosses above the rooftops.

Two national parks anchor the region's wild side. Polesie National Park protects just under a hundred square kilometres of peat bogs, lakes and wet meadows, crossed by wooden boardwalks; the whole area forms part of the transboundary West Polesie Biosphere Reserve. Roztocze National Park, based in Zwierzyniec, is a land of beech and fir forest and home to a breeding centre for the Polish konik horse at Florianka. Beyond them the province counts 17 landscape parks and 93 nature reserves.

The remaining highlights are spread evenly across the map: the spa town of Nałęczów with its turn-of-the-century villas, the chalk tunnels beneath Chełm, the Zamoyski palace at Kozłówka with its original interiors and a separate gallery of socialist-realist art, and the valley of the Bug with its wooden churches and slow meanders. Distances here are long, so a car makes the region much easier to explore.