Krakow's headline sights deserve their reputations. But you can walk the Rynek, do Wawel and see Wieliczka in two days, and then what? These twelve are the things I send people to when they have a spare afternoon, a second visit, or a low tolerance for coach parties.
Some are easy to arrange on the day. Several need booking weeks out. I have flagged which are which.
Sleep, swim and shelter underground
1. Spend the night in a salt mine. Everyone goes to Wieliczka. Almost nobody goes to the Bochnia Salt Mine (BOH-nya), about 40-50km east of Krakow and, at roughly 800 years old, the oldest working salt mine in Poland. It shares Wieliczka's UNESCO listing and gets a fraction of the visitors. The Ważyn Chamber, a vast hall around 250 metres down, is fitted out for overnight stays - bunks, sanatorium-grade salt air, an underground train to get you there and a slide that exists purely because someone decided it should. Expect somewhere in the region of 250 PLN a head and book well ahead; group bookings take up much of the calendar. Bochnia is reachable by regional train from Kraków Główny in under an hour.
2. Cross an underground brine lake. Bochnia also runs a short boat crossing on a saline lake deep in the workings, which is a genuinely strange few minutes in near-total quiet. Wieliczka has underground lakes too, though there you look rather than float. Neither is swimming - do not turn up with a towel.
3. Go down into a Cold War shelter. Nowa Huta, the steelworks district east of the centre, was built with nuclear war in mind, and fallout shelters sit beneath its apartment blocks and public buildings. Several are opened for specialised tours: concrete corridors, filtration plant, decontamination rooms, sealed blast doors. Access depends on the operator and the season, so check what is currently running rather than turning up.
Communist Krakow at street level
4. Tour Nowa Huta in a Trabant or a Maluch. Nowa Huta (NOH-va HOO-ta) was built from nothing in 1949 as a workers' city designed to dilute Krakow's stubbornly bourgeois, Catholic character. It is a masterpiece of planned urbanism and worth seeing regardless. Doing it folded into a two-stroke East German Trabant or a Fiat 126p - the "Maluch", the tiny car half of Poland learned to drive in - turns a history lesson into a comedy. Several Old Town operators run these; the cars are cramped, slow and loud, which is the point. Half a day, book a day or two ahead.
5. Ride a night tram through an empty Old Town. After the last regular services, Krakow runs a reduced network of night lines. Riding one at two in the morning, past the lit Barbican and along the Planty with four other people aboard, is oddly one of my favourite things in the city. Check the night timetable at the stop - intervals are long and missing one means a 40-minute wait or a walk.
6. Fire a Kalashnikov. Several ranges around Krakow will put an AK-47, a Tokarev or an assortment of Soviet-era weaponry in your hands under supervision, for something in the region of 200 PLN upwards depending on the package and ammunition. It is a stag-party staple and ethically not to everyone's taste - I mention it because people ask, not because I would put it above the mushrooms. Bring photo ID.
Rituals that are not put on for visitors
7. Meet the hejnał trumpeter. Every hour, from the taller tower of St Mary's Basilica on the Main Market Square, a bugler plays the hejnał (HAY-now) to the four points of the compass and breaks off mid-note, commemorating a trumpeter said to have been shot through the throat mid-warning. The players are Kraków city firefighters. The tower opens to visitors seasonally, in limited numbers, from its own separate entrance - climb it at the right moment and you watch the whole thing from a few feet away. Tickets are limited and it closes in winter; ask at the church office or the ticket point on the square.
8. Sit through a Polish mass. You do not have to believe anything. A Sunday high mass at St Mary's or at the Franciscan Church, with its Wyspiański stained glass, is an hour of extraordinary music and ritual in a full church - Polish congregations still fill their pews. Worshippers enter St Mary's by the main west door without a ticket, while sightseers use the side entrance and pay; if you go for the mass, go for the mass, sit at the back and stay put until it ends.
9. Walk Rakowicki Cemetery at dawn. Cmentarz Rakowicki, north-east of the centre on ulica Rakowicka, opened in 1803 and holds two centuries of Krakow under enormous old trees. At sunrise, in mist, with nobody else there, it is one of the most affecting places in the city. If you can time a trip to 1 November, All Saints' Day, do - after dark the entire cemetery is covered in tens of thousands of candles and the whole city walks through it. Nothing else in Poland looks like it.
Eat and drink the things nobody exports
10. Drink proper mead. Miód pitny (myood PIT-ny), literally "drinking honey", predates both beer and vodka in Poland and is still made to old ratios. The names tell you the strength and sweetness: półtorak is the richest and slowest-aged, dwójniak next, then trójniak, then czwórniak, each diluting the honey further. A good trójniak is the sensible entry point - dry-ish, warming, nothing like the syrup sold as mead elsewhere. Specialist shops around the Old Town and Kazimierz sell it by the bottle, and several Kazimierz restaurants pour it by the glass alongside their infused vodkas.
11. Forage for mushrooms. Grzybobranie (gzhi-bo-BRA-nyeh) is a national obsession, not a novelty activity. From late August through October, Poles disappear into the forests at dawn with wicker baskets after borowik (porcini) and kurki (chanterelles). Guided foraging trips run in the forests around Krakow - the Niepołomice Forest, east of the city, is the closest large one - and usually end with someone cooking what you found. Season-dependent and weather-dependent: a dry September means a thin basket. Book once you know the rain has come.
Two hours of local tribalism
12. Get to a Wisła or Cracovia match. Krakow has two old clubs whose grounds sit barely a few hundred metres apart across the Błonia meadow, and the rivalry between Wisła Kraków and Cracovia is known locally as the Holy War. Ordinary league fixtures are cheap - figure roughly 30-80 PLN - loud, and completely unlike the sanitised English matchday.
Two practical warnings. Polish stadiums require tickets to be bought against a named identity, often through the club's own system with a fan card or ID registration, so sort this out days in advance rather than at the turnstile. And the derby itself is a different proposition: extremely hard to get into, occasionally played with restrictions, and not the fixture to choose for a first experience. Pick a midweek league game instead.
Which of these to actually book, and when
The ones that fall over without planning are the Bochnia overnight, the Nowa Huta shelters, the hejnał tower in high season, foraging trips and any football ticket. Two to three weeks out is comfortable; a day out is not.
The ones you can do on impulse are the night tram, the cemetery, mass, mead and the Trabant tours if you catch a quiet week.
Seasonally: foraging is autumn only, the tower climb is warm months only, and the underground options are the ones that work best in a wet, grey January when standing on the Rynek has lost its charm. Underground temperatures sit in the low teens Celsius year-round, so take a jumper into the mine even in August.
A concrete last tip. If you do only one of these, make it Rakowicki on 1 November - but get there around dusk rather than late at night, when the candlelight is at its best against the last of the daylight and before the crowds thicken. Take the tram out, walk back into town afterwards, and stop for a glass of mead on the way.
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