Christmas in Kraków

At Kraków airport (KRK) your private chauffeur meets you and drives you inside the green Planty ring to the Hotel Copernicus, the oldest house on Kanonicza street below Wawel Hill. Once you have settled in, your guide walks you out onto the Main Market Square, the largest medieval square in Europe, where wooden stalls now fill the space beneath St Mary's Basilica for Advent. You take a first cup of grzane wino, Polish mulled wine, and a slice of piernik among the stalls as the lamps come on. The evening closes with a welcome dinner under the vaults of a 14th-century cellar below the Old Town, a short walk back to the hotel from there.

After breakfast your guide takes you up Wawel Hill for a private visit to the royal castle and cathedral, the seat of Polish kings for half a millennium, ahead of the day's queues. In the afternoon you visit the Historical Museum of Kraków for the szopki krakowskie exhibit: elaborate architectural nativity scenes, built by local makers around miniature versions of the city's own towers and turrets, part folk craft and part model-building competition, judged on the Main Square every December since 1937. Your guide explains how the tradition began, among the city's stonemasons and carpenters, and why it survives nowhere else in Poland in quite this form. The evening is yours to return to the market for grilled oscypek with cranberry and a last cup of grzane wino.

The morning is free in Kraków, time to revisit the market or walk the Planty at your own pace. In the afternoon your chauffeur drives you southeast to Wieliczka, where one of the oldest salt mines in the world runs deep underground. With your guide you make a private descent a hundred metres into the workings, passing timbered chambers and statues hewn from the rock by generations of miners, to the Chapel of St Kinga, an entire cathedral carved from salt, its chandeliers and altars cut from the same translucent stone. A candlelit dinner is laid for you here, a still hour underground, arranged directly with the mine authority subject to availability, with a private dinner back in Kraków as the fallback if the chapel is not free. Afterward the lift returns you to the surface and your driver takes you back to the Hotel Copernicus for the night.

After breakfast your driver takes you south for the two-hour run into the foothills, the land rising steadily until the Tatra peaks come into view. Zakopane has been Poland's mountain resort since the 19th century, and your guide walks you along Krupówki street, lined with the steep-roofed timber houses of the local highlander style, distinct from anything in the lowlands. You stop at a mountain dairy to taste oscypek, the smoked sheep's cheese, at the source where it is still made by hand. Snow permitting, the afternoon closes with a horse-drawn sleigh ride out along the valley, bells and all; when the season runs bare, a horse-drawn carriage takes the same route on wheels instead. You return to Kraków in the evening.

Your last morning is unhurried: a final breakfast below Wawel Hill, then time for a last loop of the Main Square market to carry a little of it home, mulled wine, oscypek or a painted bauble from the stalls. When you are ready, your chauffeur drives you to Kraków airport (KRK) for your departure, the same guide who met you on arrival seeing you off.