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OJCÓW |
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The principal point of access to the river gorge is OJCÓW , 25km
from Kraków (and served by most - but not all - Kraków-Olkusz buses),
the national park's only village and filled to bursting with local
school groups in season. Developed as a low-key health resort in the mid-nineteenth
century, it's a delightful village, with wooden houses straggling along
a valley floor framed by deciduous forest and craggy limestone cliffs.
Just beyond the car park where buses stop is a small natural history
museum (mid-May to mid-Nov Tues-Sun 9am-4.30pm; mid-Nov to mid-May Tues-Fri
8am-3pm; 2zl), where you'll find mammoth tusks, the jaws of prehistoric
cave bears, and a modest collection of stuffed local fauna. Immediately
beyond is the PTTK regional museum (Mon-Fri 9am-3pm; 2zl), located above
the Ojców post office, which contains prints of the village as it looked
in the nineteenth century, and a corner stacked with local folk costumes,
notable for the extravagantly embroidered and beaded women's jackets.
Overlooking the village to the north is a fine, ruined castle (April-Oct
Tues-Sun 10am-4.45pm, stays open later at the height of summer; 1.50zl),
the southern extremity of the Szlak Orlich Gniazd and an evocative place
in the twilight hours, circled by squadrons of bats. There's not much of
the castle left, apart from two of the original fourteenth-century
towers, the main gate entrance and the walls of the castle chapel. There
are excellent views over the winding valley, and a path through the
woods which leads up to the Zlota Góra campsite and restaurant. A few
hundred metres north up the valley from Ojców castle is the curious
spectacle of the Kaplica na Wodzie (Wooden Chapel) straddling the river
on brick piles. This odd site neatly circumvented a nineteenth-century
tsarist edict forbidding religious structures to be built "on solid
ground", part of a strategy to subdue the intransigently nationalist
Catholic Church. These days, it's only open for visits between Masses on
Sundays.
Heading south from the village takes you through a small gorge lined
with strange rock formations, most famous of which, about 15 minutes out
from the village, is the Krakowska Brama (Kraków Gate), a pair of rocks
which seem to form a huge portal leading to a side valley. Before
reaching the Krakowska Brama you may well be enticed uphill to the right
by a (black-waymarked) path to the Jaskinia Lokietka (Lokietka Cave;
late April to mid-Nov: daily 9.30am-4.30pm; 5zl), some thirty minutes'
distant, the largest of a sequence of chambers burrowing into the cliffs
outside Ojców. According to legend it was here that King Wladyslaw the
Short was hidden and protected by loyal local peasants following King
Wenceslas of Bohemia's invasion in the early fourteenth century. Around
250m long, the rather featureless illuminated cave is a bit of a let-down
if you've come expecting spectacular stone and ice formations.
Individual travellers will have to wait to join a guided group before
being allowed inside.
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