Winter Poland

Your chauffeur meets you at Warsaw airport (WAW) and drives you to the Hotel Bristol on the Royal Route. In winter the light goes early here, which suits the city: by four in the afternoon the old town is lit and the Royal Route is strung end to end. Your guide walks you through it and explains the thing most visitors never register, that this old town is a reconstruction, rebuilt through the 1950s from Bellotto's eighteenth-century cityscapes after the war left almost nothing standing. Dinner is in a vaulted cellar off the Market Square, which in December is the only sensible place to eat.

The morning goes to the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which covers the sixty-three days in 1944 when the city rose, was not relieved, and was destroyed in reprisal. It is a dense museum and much better with a historian who can tell you where to spend your attention. In the afternoon you walk the Royal Łazienki, the park the last Polish king built for himself, which is at its best under snow and almost empty in winter, with the palace sitting on its own island in a frozen lake. In the evening a pianist plays an hour of Chopin for you privately in a salon, which is how this music was written to be heard rather than from the back of a concert hall.

Wilanów sits half an hour south of the centre, a baroque royal palace that survived the war largely intact, which in this city makes it an outlier worth seeing. You go through the state rooms in daylight. Then, from late afternoon, the formal gardens become an illuminated route, tunnels and arches and a light show on the palace facade, and Poland drops its usual reserve entirely. On the way back you stop at the Warsaw market for grzaniec, the mulled wine everybody drinks standing up, and oscypek, the smoked sheep's-milk cheese grilled and served with cranberry that is genuinely worth queuing for.

After breakfast your chauffeur drives you south to Kraków, about three and a half hours, and you check into the Hotel Copernicus on Kanonicza street below Wawel Hill. Then you walk out into the Main Market Square, the largest medieval square in Europe, which from late November holds the country's best-known Christmas market: wooden stalls the length of the square in front of the Cloth Hall, with St Mary's Basilica above and the hejnał, the broken-off trumpet call, sounding from its tower every hour. Kraków was never bombed flat, so all of this is genuinely as old as it looks. Dinner is in a cellar off the square.

You start on Wawel Hill with a private visit to the royal castle and cathedral, the seat of Polish kings for five hundred years, which in winter you often have close to yourself. The afternoon goes to something that exists only here. Kraków's szopki are nativity scenes in name only: they are towering, brilliantly coloured miniature buildings, assembled from foil and wood into fantasy versions of Kraków's own churches and towers, with the nativity tucked somewhere inside. They have been made by the same families for generations and judged in a competition on the square every December since 1937. Your guide takes you through the collection at the Historical Museum and explains how the tradition started with bricklayers looking for winter work.

Twenty minutes outside Kraków you go down into Wieliczka, a salt mine worked continuously from the thirteenth century until the 1990s. What the miners carved in their own time is the reason to come: chamber after chamber cut from rock salt, including, at a hundred and one metres down, the Chapel of St Kinga, a full-sized church whose altarpieces, floor reliefs and chandeliers are all salt. Further into the mine, in a private chamber, a table is set for you for dinner by candlelight. The mine holds a steady 14°C all year, which in a Polish January is the warmest you will be all week. You are back in Kraków by mid-evening.

A three-hour drive west brings you to Wrocław, and the timing is deliberate: in December the light is gone by four, so you arrive as the Rynek is lighting up. This is the second-largest market square in Poland and it holds what many Poles will tell you is the best of the country's Christmas markets, wrapped around a gothic town hall, heavier on craft and hot food than souvenirs. Your guide walks it with you on arrival, points out what is worth eating, and leaves the evening open. On Ostrów Tumski, the cathedral island a few minutes away, the gas lamps are still lit by hand at dusk by a lamplighter, which is worth walking over for.

Wrocław was German Breslau until 1945 and was then repopulated almost entirely by Poles displaced from what is now Ukraine, so the city carries two histories at once and your guide will tell you both. You see the Centennial Hall, Max Berg's 1913 concrete dome that scandalised its critics and is UNESCO-listed now, and cross the river islands that give the city more bridges than anywhere in Poland. Running through the day is the dwarf hunt: several hundred small bronze figures set into pavements, doorways and drainpipes, which began as a protest symbol against the communist authorities in the 1980s and are now the thing every child in the city can navigate by. In snow they are conspicuously easier to find.

Breakfast is unhurried, and depending on your flight there is usually time for a last hour on the Rynek, which is a different place in the morning than it is at night: the stalls opening, the square almost empty, and the smell of the food ovens starting up. Your chauffeur then takes you the twenty minutes out to Wrocław airport (WRO) and sees you to the terminal.