Things to do in Szczecin

Landmark · Above the Odra, north of the centre

A five-hundred-metre terrace of monumental Prussian public buildings on a bluff over the river, built 1902–1921 with the fortress walls beneath it.

Local tip: Stand at the top and look at the port, then walk down the stairs to the water. It is the one place where Szczecin's scale, its river and its German origins all make sense at once. The National Museum and the Maritime Museum are both up here.

Culture · Śródmieście, by the Old Town

A white, translucent, sharply gabled concert hall completed in 2014 on the site of the destroyed Konzerthaus, and winner of the EU's Mies van der Rohe prize for contemporary architecture in 2015.

Local tip: Go inside even if you are not going to a concert — the golden main auditorium is the point, and the building glows from the street after dark. Tickets are cheap by Western European standards and the programming is serious.

Nature · South-east, beyond Podjuchy

A hilly beech forest of nearly a hundred square kilometres on the city's edge, with lakes, ravines and the Szczecin Landscape Park.

Local tip: Take the bus to Jezierzyce and walk to Jezioro Szmaragdowe — an emerald-green flooded chalk quarry that collapsed into groundwater in 1925. It is fifteen minutes from a tram stop and looks like it belongs in another country.

Nature · East of the city, on the Odra delta

One of the largest lakes in Poland, entirely inside the city boundary, connected to the sea and used for sailing rather than swimming.

Local tip: This is where Szczecin's sailing culture lives, and courses through the local clubs are cheap. The islands of the Odra delta between the lake and the city are a genuine wetland maze that almost nobody who has not got a boat ever sees.

Culture · West of the centre

The largest cemetery in Poland and one of the largest in Europe — nearly two hundred hectares laid out in 1901 as a landscaped park with a chapel, avenues and specimen trees.

Local tip: It was designed as a public park that happens to contain graves, and locals treat it that way. Go in autumn. It is the clearest surviving statement of what German Stettin thought a city should be.

Neighborhood · Across the Odra from the Old Town

The old warehouse island opposite the city, half derelict and half redeveloped, with the Lastadia boulevards and the surviving port cranes.

Local tip: Walk the boulevard on the island side at dusk and look back at Wały Chrobrego across the water — the best view of the city is from the industrial side, and the city has spent a decade slowly turning this island around. Come back in five years and it will be different.