Wieliczka is a town that sits on top of a vanished sea. Millions of years ago, this part of southern Poland lay under a shallow, salty basin, and as the water evaporated it left thick beds of rock salt, which people have mined for about seven hundred years. The Saltworks Castle, the Żupny Castle, was the administrative heart of the business, a medieval fortified complex that housed the managers, the accounts and the royal officers who ran one of the richest enterprises in Poland, since salt was money. For centuries the revenue from Wieliczka and neighbouring Bochnia paid a significant share of the Crown's expenses.
The mine below is one of the great sights of Europe. Visitors walk down several hundred steps, through timbered shafts and long galleries, to chambers carved by miners, including St Kinga's Chapel, a cathedral-sized space where the chandeliers, altars, floors and relief carvings are all made of salt. It was among the first twelve sites placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1978. The air is cool and slightly salty, and the guide will tell stories about miners, horses and underground lakes. The tourist route takes a couple of hours and covers only a small part of the mine, and a lift brings you back to the surface.
Wieliczka lies right next to Kraków, so riding here is mostly about reaching it from the city. The roads on the southern edge of Kraków are busy, with trams, buses and a lot of traffic, so go early or avoid weekends in summer, when the mine is full of coach parties. Fuel, food and parking are easy in a town of nearly nineteen thousand, and there are cafes on the market square.
The better riding is south of town, where the land rises toward the Beskids, with rolling farmland, orchards and small villages along the roads, and further south the foothills have good winding sections. The second part of this ride goes to Powroźnik, in the south of Małopolska, with its wooden Orthodox church, built by the Lemko people, a mountain community with its own culture and its own style of church, with onion domes in wood. Spring and autumn are comfortable, and winter is cold but dry. Eat a hearty soup, a plate of pierogi and an apple cake, and ask the guides which direction the old sea went.