Podkarpackie Voivodeship — high meadows, wooden churches and the world's oldest oil field.

Podkarpackie covers 17,845 km² in the far south-east of Poland, along the Slovak and Ukrainian borders. It runs from the flat lowlands and the Vistula valley in the north, through a belt of foothills, up to the Beskids and the Bieszczady in the south, with its eastern edge touching the Roztocze upland. That spread means orchards and open plains in one province and Carpathian beech forest in another part of it, along with the only high meadows of East Carpathian type in the country. The highest summit is Tarnica at 1,346 m; the regional capital is Rzeszów.

Bieszczady National Park, founded in 1973 and covering 292 km², is the largest national park in the Polish mountains. Its signature landscape is the połoniny — treeless ridge meadows above roughly 1,150 metres, some eighteen hundred hectares of them here; the routes across Połonina Wetlińska and Caryńska are among the most distinctive walks in the Carpathians. The park holds the largest free-living herd of European bison in any mountain range, along with wolves, lynx and brown bears; the lynx is its emblem. The area has belonged to the international Eastern Carpathians Biosphere Reserve since 1992, and in 2021 four fragments of its primeval beech forest — about 3,470 hectares — were added to the UNESCO listing of Europe's ancient beech woods.

The second park is Magura National Park, created in 1995, with nearly nine-tenths of its area in this province and its headquarters at Krempna. It protects just under 195 km² of the Low Beskids: broad beech forests, the gorge of the Wisłoka and, above all, the corridor animals use to move between the Western and Eastern Carpathians. The lesser spotted eagle nests here at a density that is a record for Poland and among the highest in Europe. Beyond the two parks the region has eleven landscape parks and ranks among the most heavily wooded in the country.

The busiest destination is Lake Solina. The concrete dam at Solina — 81.8 metres high and 664 metres long, the tallest in Poland — was built between 1961 and 1968; the reservoir behind it, around 22 km² in area and holding 472 million m³, is the largest in the country by volume. Filling it drowned the villages of Solina and Teleśnica Sanna and part of Wołkowyja. The shoreline now runs about 166 kilometres at normal water level, and the lake is used for sailing, paddling and as a base for walking the ridges above it.

The cultural heritage here is unusually dense. Two wooden Roman Catholic churches are UNESCO-listed — Blizne and Haczów, inscribed in 2003, the latter with a structure dated to the end of the fourteenth century and counted among the oldest wooden churches in Europe — along with four wooden tserkvas from the 2013 inscription: Radruż, Chotyniec, Smolnik and Turzańsk. Łańcut Castle was rebuilt between 1629 and 1641 for Stanisław Lubomirski as a palazzo in fortezza, ringed by Krzysztof Mieroszewski's star-shaped bastions; after 1783 Izabela Lubomirska turned the earthworks into gardens, and from 1816 the estate belonged to the Potocki family. It has been a museum since 1944, a Monument of History since 2005, and host to a music festival since 1960.

Sanok holds two collections of a different order. The Museum of Folk Architecture, founded in 1958, is the largest open-air museum in Poland: thirty-eight hectares, more than a hundred wooden buildings from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries and sectors devoted to four ethnographic groups — Pogórzanie, Dolinianie, Lemkos and Boykos — plus a reconstructed Galician market square opened in 2011. In the castle above the San, the Historical Museum keeps the world's largest collection of work by Zdzisław Beksiński and some two hundred Carpathian icons. Przemyśl Fortress, expanded by Austria-Hungary from the 1870s into a ring of seventeen main forts along a forty-five-kilometre perimeter, was in 1914 the third largest fortress in Europe after Antwerp and Verdun and went through three sieges; it became a Monument of History in 2019. At Bóbrka near Krosno the world's oldest oil field has been worked since 1854, started by Ignacy Łukasiewicz with Tytus Trzecieski and Karol Klobassa-Zrencki; the surviving Franek and Janina shafts stand in the grounds of the oil industry museum, itself a Monument of History.