Kazimierz Dolny looks like a town that has been preserved in amber, and the reason is quite simple: it grew rich, then it went quiet. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries it was a grain port on the Vistula, where merchants loaded wheat and rye onto barges bound for Gdańsk and the Baltic, and the money they made built the townhouses, with decorated gables and carved stone, that still surround the market square. When the river trade declined, the town stopped growing, and nobody rebuilt it. In the twentieth century painters found it, and artists have kept coming since.
The square is the centre of everything, with a well in the middle, cafes along the edges and shops selling pottery, paintings and the local speciality, a bread baked in the shape of a rooster. It is crowded on summer weekends, when coach parties and day trippers arrive from Warsaw, and magical on a weekday morning in May or October, when you can hear your own footsteps. Above the town, a ruined castle and a watchtower give a view over the river and the roofs, and the steep lanes that lead up to them are lined with old granaries.
The riding around it is distinctive. The land here is a loess upland, a soft yellow soil that rivers and rain have carved into deep, narrow gorges, and the roads follow them, sunk between high banks with tree roots hanging overhead. The surface is mostly good, the curves are gentle, and the real hazards are farm traffic, cyclists and the sheer number of tourists in the high season. On the other side of the Vistula, the land is flat and open, and you can cross by a small ferry to the castle ruins at Janowiec, which is a good reason to stay a bit longer.
Kazimierz is a small town, but it has fuel, cafes and restaurants, though prices rise and tables fill on weekends. Puławy, eleven kilometres away, is the larger town for anything more. Book accommodation ahead in the high season, and do not expect to park near the square. The best months are May and September, when the light is soft and the crowds are thin, and the willows along the river are in leaf.