Masovian Voivodeship — the largest province, a rebuilt capital and forest at its edge.

Masovia is the largest of Poland's sixteen provinces, covering some 35,559 km² — about 11.4 per cent of the country — and it has the largest population too. The region spreads across both banks of the middle Vistula, at the point where the Narew and the Bug join it. The scenery is calm rather than dramatic: broad river valleys, pine forests, sandy terraces and fields lined with willows. Besides Warsaw, the main towns are Radom, Płock, Siedlce and Ostrołęka.

Nearly every visitor starts in Warsaw. Its Old Town was almost completely destroyed during the war and rebuilt in the 1950s from surviving plans, drawings and painted views. It was precisely for the scale and quality of that reconstruction that the historic centre was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on 2 September 1980, as an outstanding example of rebuilding an urban ensemble. The rest of the city tells other stories: the Łazienki park, the Wilanów palace, the Stalinist architecture of the city centre and the housing estates of the post-war decades.

The Kampinos National Park begins right at the city boundary. Poland's second largest national park, established in 1959, it protects more than 385 km² of pine forest, inland dunes and marshland — an unusual thing to reach by city bus. Since 2000 the park has also held the status of a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and its flat, well-marked trails make some of the easiest day walks in the country.

Beyond the capital, Płock repays a detour: one of Poland's oldest towns, built on a bluff above the Vistula, with a cathedral whose royal chapel holds the sarcophagus of the rulers Władysław Herman and Bolesław the Wrymouth. Further north, Pułtusk — nicknamed the Venice of Masovia — has a market square roughly 400 metres long, reckoned to be the longest cobbled market square in Europe. South of Warsaw, at Czersk, the brick towers of the Masovian dukes' castle still stand above the river valley.

Music and rural heritage form a strand of their own. Frédéric Chopin was born in 1810 at Żelazowa Wola near Sochaczew; the manor and its park are now a museum and a concert venue. At Sierpc, the Museum of the Masovian Countryside is a large open-air site where a nineteenth-century village has been reassembled, complete with cottages, windmills, a forge and a church. With the region's dense road and rail network, most of these places work well as a day trip from Warsaw.