To Tyniec along the river: the most beautiful 13 kilometres in Kraków
An abbey on a rock above the Vistula, an hour's ride from the Market Square. It is my favourite route and I want to give it to you.
Start below Wawel, by the dragon. Drop down to the Czerwieński boulevard and keep the Vistula on your left. The first three kilometres are city: Dębnicki Bridge, boulevards full of runners, on the far bank the Norbertine convent with the Kościuszko Mound above it. Then the city ends. Beyond Zwierzyniecki Bridge the embankment begins, asphalt on top, and all around meadows, cows and a silence as if Kraków had been left a hundred kilometres behind.
On your right you pass Przegorzały with its castle on a rock, built in the 1940s for the German governor, today with a café and a viewing terrace worth riding up to on the way back. Further on, on the hill, the towers of the Camaldolese monastery at Bielany gleam white. The monks live there in silence, in separate hermitages, and women are admitted only a few days a year. From the embankment you see it best.
Tyniec appears suddenly, round a bend of the river: the Benedictine abbey on a limestone rock twenty metres above the water, with towers and walls like a painting. Monks have been here since about 1044, almost a thousand years, with a gap after the nineteenth-century dissolution, when the monastery stood in ruins and was rebuilt only after the war. The way into the courtyard climbs steeply; leave the bike at the gate, it is worth it.
The monastery has a church with a baroque interior, a museum in the old cellars, a shop with Benedictine products (liqueurs, honeys, cosmetics made by the monks) and a restaurant with a terrace over the Vistula where lunch tastes like a reward. In summer people sit on the rocks below the walls with their feet above the water, and a ferry crosses to the far bank, to Piekary.
You can return the same way or in a loop through Skawina and Zakrzówek if you have the legs for an extra ten kilometres. I usually go back along the river, into the wind or with it, and stop at Przegorzały for a coffee with a view of the route I have just ridden. In the cycling app this trip comes first: the narrator will tell you on the way about the Norbertines, the Camaldolese and how the monks came to settle above the Vistula.