Krakow Poland Travel Guide

Kraków is not only an historic and visual gem, it's Poland's second largest city and covers both banks of the Wisla (or Vistula) river. At the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, the metropolitan area has more than 1.4 million inhabitants if you include the surrounding communities.
Kraków is the capital city of Lesser Poland Voivodeship (Polish: Małopolskie) in the southern region of Poland and had a population of 756,000 in 2007 (1.4 million after including surrounding communities).

Kraków is also known as Cracow, or Krakow (without the diacritic) and dates back to at least the 7th century. It was the capital of Poland from 1038 to 1569 and then of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1569 to 1596 (1609 by some accounts) and this long history has made it one of the leading hubs of Polish academic, cultural, and economic life.