Park im. Wisławy Szymborskiej, Kraków

Park im. Wisławy Szymborskiej is a compact Kraków park honouring the Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska. Opened in 2023 on a former barracks parade ground and later parking lot, it combines an orchard, meadow, grove and watercourse with playful literary installations inspired by her collages and collections.

Park im. Wisławy Szymborskiej is a small city park named for Wisława Szymborska, the poet awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Along the main avenue, the narrow watercourse runs beside the path and drops in steps into ponds.

It cools the park in warm weather, supports water plants, and collects rainwater from both the grounds and nearby buildings. This green space occupies 0.8 hectares between Karmelicka and Dolnych Młynów Streets, beside the regional public library. For much of the nineteenth century it formed the parade ground of Austro-Hungarian barracks; after the military complex was decommissioned, the site spent years as an unremarkable parking lot.

More than nine thousand votes backed the proposal to replace it with a park, and it opened on the second of July 2023, exactly one hundred years after Szymborska’s birth. The planting scheme gives each section a different character: an orchard, an open meadow, and a small grove. There are 125 newly planted trees here, including fruit trees.

Notice the umbrellas and the playful wall composition: both refer to the poet’s habits and her fondness for collecting odd objects. The three Y-shaped panels let you turn tiles of words and pictures into changing phrases, inspired by Szymborska’s handmade newspaper-cutout collages.