Podlaskie Voivodeship — four national parks and a borderland of three faiths.

Podlaskie sits in Poland's north-eastern corner, against the Belarusian and Lithuanian borders, and covers 20,187 km². It is the least densely populated province in the country and also the coldest — January averages here run lower than anywhere else in Poland. Those two facts together explain how the region looks: empty roads, villages a good distance apart, and nature that never had to give way to building. The Narew runs through the middle and the Bug marks the southern edge.

No other province has four national parks. Białowieża National Park, created in 1932 as Poland's second, protects the last fragment of primeval-type forest in Europe; its strict reserve went onto the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979, and the inscription was extended in 1992 to take in the Belarusian side. This is home to the largest free-living population of European bison anywhere — roughly five hundred animals on the Polish side of the forest. The strict reserve can only be entered with a licensed guide, which keeps the numbers down.

Biebrza National Park is the largest in Poland at 592 km², following the Biebrza along almost the whole of its hundred-kilometre course. It protects the country's biggest fen peatlands, among the largest in Europe, listed under the Ramsar Convention since 1995. More than two hundred and seventy bird species have been recorded here, and the animal everyone hopes to see is the elk. The marshes are reached from the old Tsar's Road, from observation towers and from the water. Next door, Narew National Park, founded in 1996, protects a hydrological rarity: a stretch of river split into dozens of parallel channels, crossed by a boardwalk over a kilometre long.

Further north comes Wigry National Park, established in 1989 around the lake of the same name — more than two thousand hectares of water reaching 73 metres deep, with a former Camaldolese monastery on the shore. The Czarna Hańcza flows out of it, one of the best-known canoe routes in Poland. Beyond that the Suwałki country begins, with the Suwałki Landscape Park, the oldest landscape park in the country, dating from 1976. It holds Lake Hańcza, at 108.5 metres the deepest in Poland, in a landscape of moraine hills and fields of glacial boulders.

Culturally the region is the product of centuries of living side by side. More than eight in a hundred residents belong to the Orthodox Church, more than twenty thousand Belarusians live here, and the villages of Kruszyniany and Bohoniki keep wooden Tatar mosques with their old burial grounds — a national Monument of History since 2012. The same status belongs to Supraśl, with its Orthodox monastery, and to Tykocin, with its intact small-town layout and baroque synagogue.

Białystok, the regional capital, grew up around the Branicki Palace, often called the Versailles of Podlasie. Tylman van Gameren rebuilt the earlier Gothic-Renaissance castle between 1691 and 1697, and Jan Klemens Branicki and his architects gave it its final late-baroque form in the eighteenth century. Destroyed in 1944 and reconstructed afterwards, it now houses a medical university, though the formal French garden is open to everyone. From Białystok it is a short run to the Augustów Canal, built between 1824 and 1839 to plans by General Ignacy Prądzyński, linking the Biebrza with the Niemen over a hundred kilometres and eighteen locks.