Lubusz Voivodeship — forests, vineyards and bunkers by the Oder.

Lubusz covers just under 14,000 km² and, like Kuyavian-Pomerania, has no single capital: the governor sits in Gorzów Wielkopolski, the regional assembly in Zielona Góra. The region was stitched together from several older lands — Lubusz Land, slices of Lower Silesia and Greater Poland, and Lower Lusatia in the south. What binds them is forest: close to half the area is wooded, the highest share of any Polish region, which is why drives here run for long stretches between walls of pine with nothing much in between. The terrain is gentle, with no hill reaching 227 metres. The Oder and the Lusatian Neisse form the western border; the Warta cuts through the middle.

The region's finest sight sits exactly on that border. Muskau Park spreads across 728 hectares on both banks of the Neisse — 522 hectares on the Polish side near Łęknica, 206 around Bad Muskau in Germany. Hermann von Pückler-Muskau laid it out between 1815 and 1845, treating the river valley as a painting: moving paths, planting clumps of trees, cutting sightlines open. It went onto the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004. Walking it means crossing the rebuilt Double Bridge and English Bridge and changing countries several times without noticing.

A few kilometres away the same landscape explains itself. The Muskau Arch is a terminal moraine bent into a vast curve, one of the clearest examples anywhere and visible from satellite imagery. Lignite mining left hundreds of flooded pits in colours from turquoise to rust. The transboundary geopark, run jointly with Germany, has been part of the UNESCO Global Geoparks network since 2015 — the first in Poland. Trails are short and marked; swimming in the mining lakes is not allowed.

The region's other face is underground. The Oder-Warthe Bend fortified front, known in Poland as the Międzyrzecki Rejon Umocniony, was built between 1934 and 1944 as a German defensive line. Along some eighty kilometres it combined heavy combat bunkers, anti-tank obstacles and armoured cupolas, and the most heavily fortified central section is linked by 32 to 35 kilometres of tunnels — among the largest such networks in the world. In winter they serve as a mass roost for roughly thirty thousand bats of twelve species, making the Nietoperek reserve one of Europe's most important. Visitor routes start at Pniewo and near Boryszyn; it stays around ten degrees below ground, so bring a jacket and a torch.

For nature, the region rests on seven landscape parks and on Warta Mouth National Park, created in 2001 out of the former Słońsk reserve. In the polders between the Warta and the Oder, water levels shift by several metres over a year; more than two hundred bird species have been recorded, and the area is protected under the Ramsar Convention. Part of Drawa National Park also reaches into the region's north. On the human side: Zielona Góra, where vines have grown since the Middle Ages — a vineyard is documented as early as 1314 — and where the September grape harvest festival is the year's main event; the Cistercian monastery at Gościkowo-Paradyż; the painted wooden church at Klępsk; and Żagań, with its Augustinian complex and a prisoner-of-war museum on the site of Stalag Luft III, from which seventy-six Allied airmen escaped through tunnel "Harry" on the night of 24–25 March 1944 — the break-out behind The Great Escape.