Current Time in Katowice, Poland

Katowice lies in southern Poland, in the heart of Upper Silesia, on the low watershed between the basins of the Vistula and the Oder. It is the capital of Silesian Voivodeship and the centre of a dense conurbation of neighbouring towns that together hold well over two million people, one of the largest urban regions in Central Europe. Forests and parks fill surprisingly large parts of the city limits, breaking up an urban landscape of coal shafts, tenements and glass towers.

Around two hundred and eighty-five thousand people live in Katowice itself. For a century and a half its importance rested on coal and steel, and it was the industrial engine of Poland. Since the 1990s the city has reinvented itself with striking speed as a centre for business services, conferences, technology and culture, while the mines have closed one after another.

Katowice was a village of ironworkers and foresters until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the railway arrived and Prussian industrialists sank coal mines and built steelworks. It received town rights in 1865 and grew explosively. After the First World War and three Silesian uprisings the region was divided, and Katowice became the capital of the autonomous Silesian Voivodeship within the Polish republic, gaining a striking modernist centre in the 1930s, including one of Europe's first steel-framed skyscrapers. Occupation, wartime destruction and postwar communist industrialisation followed, and in 1981 the Wujek mine here was the scene of the deadliest confrontation of the martial law period, commemorated by a monument.

The city's emblem is the Spodek, a flying saucer of an arena built in 1971 and still hosting concerts and championships. Beside it stands the Culture Zone, laid out on the site of the former Katowice coal mine, where the International Congress Centre with its grass-covered valley, the acoustically superb concert hall of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Silesian Museum, whose galleries lie underground beneath preserved pithead buildings, form one of the most admired urban regeneration projects in Poland. Elsewhere the workers' housing estates of Nikiszowiec and Giszowiec, built in red brick before the First World War, are protected monuments and favourite film locations, and the Cathedral of Christ the King is the largest in the country.

Katowice was named a UNESCO City of Music in 2015 and hosts festivals ranging from OFF Festival and Tauron New Music to the Rawa Blues Festival, the biggest indoor blues event in the world. Mariacka Street is the centre of nightlife, and the Silesian dialect and cuisine, with its rolled beef roulade and dumplings, remain a proud local identity.

Trams have run across the conurbation since 1894, and buses, an extensive rail network, the A4 motorway and Katowice Airport at Pyrzowice provide connections. The University of Silesia, the Academy of Music and the Academy of Fine Arts fill the centre with students.

Katowice is the story of a coal city becoming a cultural one, and it is now among the most dynamic destinations in Poland.