Zakopane, Poland Summary

photo by elsabeisme

South of Nowy Targ, the road continues another 20km along the course of the Bialy Dunajec before reaching the edges of ZAKOPANE, a major mountain resort, crowded with visitors throughout its summer hiking and winter skiing seasons. It has been an established attraction for Poles since the 1870s, when the purity of the mountain air began to attract the attention of doctors and their consumptive city patients. Within a few years, this inaccessible mountain village of sheep farmers was transformed, as the medics were followed by Kraków artists and intellectuals, who established a fashionable colony in the final decades of Austro-Hungarian rule. A popular holiday centre ever since, Poles began discovering the place en masse in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the postwar era the town grew to become one of the country’s prime tourist hot-spots. In step with the growing influx of foreigners, drawn by the lure of the mountains (and what remain by Western standards bargain prices), Zakopane has of late begun to acquire the hollow, overdeveloped feel of a major European tourist trap. It’s a must for the wonderful setting and access to the peaks, but the distinctive traditional górale architecture of much of the town is being increasingly submerged in the welter of commercial developments.