Gołdap — a spa on a border lake, beside the Rominten Forest — Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship

A town founded by ducal order

The name is older than the town and comes from Old Prussian, usually read as "river in a hollow", which suits the landscape. In German the place was Goldap, in Lithuanian Geldapė. The village was founded in 1565 by order of Duke Albrecht Hohenzollern, at first under the name Szyłajty, and town rights under Chełmno law followed in 1570.

More survives from the East Prussian past than a first look suggests. The co-cathedral of Mary Mother of the Church goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century, was destroyed in 1944–1945, rebuilt in the first half of the 1980s, became Catholic in 1984 and a co-cathedral in 1992. The second church, St Leo's of 1894, came through the war in far better shape.

The water tower is a story of its own: built in 1905, close to forty-seven metres tall, seven floors. It stopped working in 1986 after the tank cracked, and in July 2009 it opened to visitors. Add the barracks of 1906–1910, the interwar town hall, the old Jewish cemetery from the early nineteenth century, and the remains of a German air force headquarters by the lake, built in 1940 and destroyed four years later.

What the spa treats

Gołdap is a climate and peat-mud spa rather than a drinking resort: the basis here is air and peat, not a mineral spring. The main approved directions of treatment are disorders of the musculoskeletal system, rheumatic conditions and recovery after injury.

The town received outside funding for spa investment in 2010, and in 2012 decided on a spa park with a pump room, a salt grotto and a graduation tower. The two brine graduation towers on the lakeshore came into use on 30 April 2014, more than six months late; at the time they were the fourth such installation in Poland. A graduation tower works as a very large diffuser: brine trickles down bundles of blackthorn twigs and the aerosol that forms around it is simply breathed in while walking.

The climate is harsher than anywhere else in lowland Poland, and that is part of the treatment rather than an obstacle. In the neighbouring Rominten Forest the January mean drops to about minus five degrees, July holds at sixteen to seventeen, snow lies for close to a hundred days a year, and the growing season shortens to a hundred and ninety days. Annual rainfall reaches seven hundred millimetres.

A lake split by the border

Lake Gołdap is a glacial trough lake whose northern part lies in Russia, where it is called Ozero Krasnoye. 149 hectares remain on the Polish side, out of a total of about 2.26 square kilometres. The Polish basin runs up to 2930 metres long and 880 metres wide, the shoreline measures some 7600 metres, the greatest depth is close to eleven metres against a mean of 5.6, and the water surface lies at a hundred and fifty metres above sea level.

The border across the lake is not a map curiosity but something you feel on the shore: beyond the water there is nowhere to go. The Polish name was introduced officially in 1949, replacing the German Goldaper See. The main inflow is the Jarka, the outflow the Gołdapa, which gave the town its name.

The lakeside holds what people come for without a prescription: the towers, a beach, a shore walk. On the other side of town rises Piękna Góra, with over two thousand metres of ski runs, five lifts including a chairlift serving a seven-hundred-and-fifty-metre slope, and a concrete toboggan track more than a kilometre long.

The Rominten Forest next door

This is the real reason to stay more than a day. The Rominten Forest covers some 35 500 hectares in all, about 15 500 of them on the Polish side. The terrain is unmistakable in lowland Poland: moraines, glacial clays and sands give height differences of a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty metres, the highest point reaches 295.4 metres, and between the hills sit peat bogs, marshes and spring mires.

The woodland is spruce and pine with oak, lime, birch, hornbeam and alder, which is why comparisons with the taiga are not overdone here. Over seventy species protected or threatened in Poland grow in it, among them the fragrant orchid, whose only known lowland sites in the country are in this forest. Game is plentiful: elk, red deer, roe deer, wild boar, wolf, lynx and beaver, and on 17 April 2021 a herd of European bison was released from an enclosure. Birds include cranes, white and black storks, white-tailed eagle and black grouse.

The forest is protected by the Rominten Forest Landscape Park, which contains several nature reserves: Mechacz Wielki, Boczki, Czarnówko, Dziki Kąt, Struga Żytkiejmska, Czerwona Struga and Uroczysko Kramnik. History added its own thread: around the turn of the twentieth century this was the hunting ground of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who kept a residence at Rominten, today's Krasnolesie. His wooden hunting lodge was moved to a park in Königsberg after 1945.

Getting there

By car — national road 65, running from the Russian border through Olecko and Grajewo to the crossing into Belarus; it bypasses the town centre.
By regional roads — the 650 from Węgorzewo and Srokowo, the 651 from Sejny and Dubeninki; both take in the best stretches of this landscape.
By train — not possible: Gołdap has neither passenger nor freight services today. The old lines, including the 1879 route from Insterburg through Goldap to Ełk, were closed or lifted.
On foot — the European long-distance path E11 ends in Gołdap, so the town tends to be a finish rather than a start.
A note on the border — the road crossing into Kaliningrad Oblast lies a few kilometres north of the centre, but the rules have changed in recent years and need checking before you travel.

Worth knowing

Gołdap is small — a little over thirteen thousand people on seventeen square kilometres — and works better as a base than as a destination. The day divides itself: towers and lake in one half, the Rominten Forest in the other. The town has been a county seat again since 2002 and belongs to the Cittaslow network, which describes its pace well.

On the way out to the forest, stop at the old railway from Żytkiejmy, in service from 1927 to 1944. Its viaducts remain, above all those at Stańczyki — among the tallest in Poland and the most photographed thing in the district. What is open in the spa facilities shifts through the year, so check at source before travelling.

How to get there and practical info

Location: Warmian-Masurian voivodeship, Gołdap county, on Lake Gołdap and the river Gołdapa, at the edge of the Rominten Forest
What it is: a statutory Polish health resort, climate and peat-mud type; town rights since 1570
Resources and treatments: medicinal peat and climate; brine graduation towers by the lake, a mineral water pump room and a salt grotto in the spa park
Main directions of treatment: musculoskeletal disorders, rheumatic conditions, recovery after injury
Lake Gołdap: 149 hectares on the Polish side out of roughly 2.26 km²; depth to almost 11 metres; the border with Kaliningrad Oblast crosses the lake
Nearby: the Rominten Forest and its landscape park, Piękna Góra with lifts and a toboggan track, the Stańczyki viaducts
Current opening and tickets: official site of the town of Gołdap

When to go

Spring

The forest wakes later here than in the rest of Poland, but that is when birdsong carries best and the bogs are still wet and empty. The graduation towers start once the night frosts end.

Summer

The shortest but fullest season: lake, beach, shore walks and whole days in the forest. Nights are noticeably cooler than in central Poland.

Autumn

The mixed woodland turns unevenly and slowly, and visitor numbers fall to almost nothing. A good time for cycling and for the Stańczyki viaducts.

Winter

Snow lies for about a hundred days a year, longer than anywhere else in lowland Poland, which is what the runs on Piękna Góra and the toboggan track are built on. The frosts can be sharp.

Gołdap — a spa on a border lake, beside the Rominten Forest