Presidential Palace
The Warsaw Pact was signed in this building on 14 May 1955 — it's still the working home of Poland's president.
Coming soon on iOS — be first to walk Warsaw offline.
Started in 1643 as the private mansion of a nobleman so wealthy he could cross Poland without leaving his own estates, the neoclassical palace completed in 1818 has since hosted the authors of Europe's first modern constitution (1791), served Nazi occupiers as a Deutsches Haus, and survived the 1944 Warsaw Uprising intact while the city around it burned. Few buildings carry this much of a continent's history in a single facade.
What to look for
- The neoclassical exterior completed in 1818 — the result of successive rebuilds on a 1643 foundation
- Sigismund's Column just nearby, designed by the same architect, Constantino Tencalla, who also drew up the original palace
- The fact that the building emerged from the 1944 Warsaw Uprising undamaged — a sharp contrast to the destruction visible across the rest of the old city
The palace is an active presidential residence on Krakowskie Przedmieście; the exterior and forecourt are viewable from the street.
Presidential Palace is one of 36 sights worth the detour in Warsaw, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Warsaw pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Warsaw
- PGE Narodowy (Kazimierz Górski National Stadium)Poland's biggest football bowl hangs a retractable PVC roof from a central spire — when the mechanism works, it unfolds like a sail over 58,580 seats.
- Palace of Culture and ScienceStalin's skyscraper — Poles nicknamed it "elephant in lacy underwear" and never tore it down.
- Royal Castle in WarsawThe Nazis dynamited this building in 1944. Every room you walk through was rebuilt, stone by stone, between 1971 and 1984.
- Warsaw Old TownBombed flat in WWII and rebuilt from scratch — the world's first fully resurrected historic city core, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
- National Museum in WarsawThe gallery that brought Nubian Christian art from a Sudanese cathedral to Warsaw.
- Wilanów PalaceBuilt for a warrior king while Poland still existed — and open as a museum since 1805.