Pomeranian Voivodeship — The Tricity, Kashubia and shifting dunes on the open Baltic.

Pomeranian Voivodeship runs from the Bay of Gdańsk deep inland, as far as the Kashubian lakes and the forests of Tuchola. Its backbone is the Tricity — Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia, three towns of entirely different origins now fused into one conurbation by a commuter railway. Gdańsk is a thousand-year-old port and Hanseatic city: Long Market with Artus Court and the Neptune fountain, St Mary's Church, the medieval Crane on the Motława, and beyond the old town Westerplatte and the European Solidarity Centre beside the former shipyard. Gdynia was built from scratch as a new port between the wars and remains a textbook of Polish modernism, with museum ships moored at Kościuszko Square.

Between the two lies Sopot, a resort with a long bathing tradition whose emblem is a wooden pier of about 511 metres — the longest of its kind in Europe. Monte Cassino street leads straight from the station to the sand, and wooded moraine hills rise behind the town with viewpoints over the bay.

North of the bay the Hel Peninsula reaches out to sea: a narrow bar of sand, only a few hundred metres wide at its thinnest, with the open Baltic on one side and the sheltered Bay of Puck on the other. That geography has made Puck, Chałupy, Kuźnica and Jastarnia one of Europe's best-known windsurfing and kitesurfing areas. At the far end sits the town of Hel, with its lighthouse, seal centre and coastal defence museum.

Further west the coast turns wild. Słowiński National Park, created in 1967 and part of the UNESCO network of biosphere reserves since 1977, protects the strip between Łeba and Rowy: the coastal lakes Łebsko and Gardno, peat bogs, and the celebrated shifting dunes. The largest of them, the Łącka Dune, stands at about 42 metres and travels several metres inland each year, burying the forest as it goes. Climbing its crest for a view of an entirely empty horizon is one of the stronger experiences on the Polish coast.

Inland begins Kashubia, a region with its own language — recognised in Poland as a regional language — and a landscape so hummocky that its core is nicknamed Kashubian Switzerland. The high point is Wieżyca (329 m), the tallest hill of the Kashubian Lake District, with an observation tower on top. Open-air museums and embroidery workshops keep the local culture visible, while the ribbon lakes around Kartuzy, Chmielno and Wdzydze are used for paddling and sailing. The south-west of the voivodeship is taken up by the Tuchola Forest, the largest continuous woodland in Poland; the biosphere reserve here was designated in 2010.

Malbork is an outing in its own right. The Teutonic castle on the Nogat, once the capital of the Order's state, is reckoned the largest brick castle in the world and covers some twenty hectares; it joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997. The train from Gdańsk takes a little over half an hour. Nearby, the Żuławy delta is worth a detour — a low-lying, canal-cut landscape of polders, arcaded houses and historic pumping stations.