Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship — Europe's oldest hills, flint mines and loess ravines.

Świętokrzyskie covers roughly 11,700 km² and is, after Opole, the smallest Polish region — which works in its favour, since a single base puts almost everything within a day's reach. The capital, Kielce, sits in the middle. The region takes its name from the Holy Cross Mountains, a low range whose highest summit does not pass 614 metres but which counts among the oldest in Europe. Their core is Cambrian quartzite sandstone, raised first in the Caledonian and then in the Variscan orogeny, and flattened and flooded by sea many times since. To the south lies the Nida valley, a warm gypsum country; the Vistula forms the eastern boundary.

The best-known part is the Łysogóry ridge, with Łysica (614 m) and Łysa Góra (595 m). Świętokrzyski National Park, created on 1 May 1950 as Poland's third, protects a little over 76 km², about ninety-five per cent of it forest — mostly beech and fir. Its signature feature is the gołoborza: fields of sharp-edged quartzite blocks with no soil and no plants, formed during the Ice Age as water froze and thawed repeatedly in rock fissures. On top of Łysa Góra stands the former Benedictine abbey of Święty Krzyż, ringed by the remains of a pre-Christian stone rampart — a reminder that the hill mattered long before the monastery.

Older still is what lies underground. At Krzemionki, near Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, a complex of prehistoric mines for striped flint has survived: roughly four thousand shafts across more than 78 hectares, worked from the middle of the fourth to the middle of the second millennium BC. The geologist Jan Samsonowicz found them in 1922. Axes made from this flint travelled several hundred kilometres, which makes the site evidence of long-distance exchange at a surprising scale. In 2019 the mining region entered the UNESCO World Heritage List, the first Polish archaeological site to do so. Visits follow an underground route between the pillars the Neolithic miners left standing.

The region's handsomest town is Sandomierz, spread over seven hills above the Vistula and declared a Monument of History in 2017. It keeps the Gothic Opatów Gate, a town hall with a Renaissance parapet, a cathedral painted in 1421, the Romanesque church of St James from the first half of the 13th century, and an underground route through old merchants' cellars. Loess ravines start just beyond the houses, along with the Pieprzowe Hills and their exposure of the oldest rocks in this part of Poland. The other heavyweight is Ujazd, where Krzysztof Ossoliński built Krzyżtopór between 1621 and 1644: a palazzo in fortezza set inside a pentagon of bastions, one of the largest palaces in Europe before Versailles was raised. It burned in 1770 and has stood as a roofless ruin ever since, with most of its walls intact.

Smaller places fill in the rest without dropping in quality. In Kielce, the Palace of the Kraków Bishops, built for Bishop Jakub Zadzik between 1637 and 1641, is the best-preserved early Baroque residence in the country, with ceiling paintings from Tomasz Dolabella's workshop and the National Museum inside. At Wąchock, the Cistercian abbey founded in 1179 has a chapter house widely called the finest Romanesque interior in Poland, and facades banded in alternating sandstone. Chęciny offers a royal castle ruin on a limestone ridge, with the dripstone-rich Raj Cave nearby. Two spa towns work the Nida valley: Busko-Zdrój, where sulphide baths have been given since the Marconi sanatorium opened in 1836, and smaller Solec-Zdrój. Outside the national park, nine landscape parks carry the region's conservation.