Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship — two thousand lakes, boats on rails and Teutonic castles.

Warmian-Masurian covers 24,174 km² in north-eastern Poland and meets the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad along its northern edge. The name joins two lands with different pasts: Warmia, ruled by prince-bishops after the Second Peace of Thorn and Catholic ever since, and Masuria, once part of Ducal Prussia and largely Protestant; Powiśle, Bartia and Natangia fall inside the province too. The ice sheet shaped all of it — the highest hill, Dylewska Góra, reaches only 312 metres, while the Raczki Elbląskie depression lies 1.8 metres below sea level. With around fifty-five people per square kilometre, this is one of the emptiest parts of the country.

There are more than three thousand lakes here, about two thousand of them larger than a hectare, including the two biggest in Poland: Śniardwy (over 100 km²) and Mamry. Canals and locks tie them into one continuous waterway, so the lake district can be sailed end to end; the main harbours are Giżycko, Mikołajki and Węgorzewo. Forest covers close to 31 per cent of the province, and the largest block, Puszcza Piska, stretches towards a thousand square kilometres.

Conservation here rests mainly on landscape parks and nature reserves. Masurian Landscape Park, created in 1977 and covering more than fifty-three thousand hectares, takes in Śniardwy, the northern part of Puszcza Piska and the Krutynia river; it holds eleven reserves, among them the ornithological reserve at Łuknajno, nearly 1,190 hectares, known for its large colony of swans. The Krutynia is also Poland's best-known lowland canoe route, running through ribbon lakes and shaded stretches of forest.

The Elbląg Canal is a piece of engineering with few parallels. The 84.2-kilometre waterway was built between 1844 and 1860 to designs by Georg Jacob Steenke; instead of a long chain of locks, five inclined planes carry vessels overland on wheeled cradles running on rails, covering 99.5 metres of height difference in total. Falling water drives the mechanism — there are no electric motors involved — and it has worked since the middle of the nineteenth century. The route links Lake Drużno near Elbląg with the country around Ostróda, and the canal has been a Monument of History since 2011.

Warmia left behind churches and castles of the first order. At Frombork, above the Vistula Lagoon, the cathedral was raised between 1329 and 1388; Nicolaus Copernicus worked on the cathedral hill almost without interruption from 1510 until his death in 1543 and was buried there. The octagonal Radziejowski Tower of 1685, with walls seven metres thick, now holds a Foucault pendulum, and a planetarium stands alongside. The castle of the Warmian bishops at Lidzbark Warmiński, built between 1350 and 1401, has two tiers of cloisters often compared with those at Wawel and Gothic paintings in its chambers; Ignacy Krasicki lived here, the Warmian Museum occupies it today, and it became a Monument of History in 2018. So did the baroque basilica at Święta Lipka, built in 1688–1693, enclosed by a cloister with corner chapels and famous for its organ of 1719–1721, whose carved figures move as it is played.

History presses close in this region. At Grunwald, between the villages of Stębark, Łodwigowo and Ulnowo, one of the largest battles of medieval Europe was fought on 15 July 1410; the field carries a 1960 monument of eleven thirty-metre masts, the foundations of the chapel built after the battle, and a museum in Stębark. The battlefield became a Monument of History in 2010, and the fighting is re-enacted every year in mid-July. From the Second World War there is Gierłoż near Kętrzyn, where Hitler's headquarters, the Wolf's Lair, was built between 1940 and 1944 — some eighty masonry structures across two hundred and fifty hectares, with bunker walls several metres thick. This is where Claus von Stauffenberg's attempt on Hitler's life failed on 20 July 1944; German forces blew the complex up in January 1945, and clearing the mines afterwards took years. Away from all that, the region keeps a slower register: most of Poland's Cittaslow towns, committed to an unhurried pace and local food, are found here.