Highlights of Piechowice include the Wodospad Szklarki waterfall, two glacial cirques, a green hiking trail, and climbing and MTB routes. Historic buildings round out the selection. When planning your trip, consider whether you want to focus on landforms, a route, climbing, cycling or architectural history.
A waterfall, cirques and an old tree
The Wodospad Szklarki waterfall lies within the city limits of Piechowice and is 13.3 metres high. The Śnieżne Kotły lie entirely within the municipality of Piechowice. They consist of two well-preserved cirques with distinctive glacial features. A cirque is a landform shaped by glaciers. While the waterfall’s height makes it a distinctive natural landmark, the focus at Śnieżne Kotły is on the two cirques and their glacial formation.
In Piechowice Dolne, a yew tree grows at Kryształowa 12. It is estimated to be over 500 years old. Here, the focus is on a single tree and its estimated age, not a height measurement or a glacial landform.
Hiking trail and climbing routes
A green hiking trail of the Ścieżka nad Reglami runs through the floor of Śnieżne Kotły. It leads from the area around the mountain hut below Łabski Szczyt, via Czarny Kocioł Jagniątkowski, to Przełęcz Karkonoska. The sequence of starting area, intermediate point and destination makes the route easy to follow; the Kotły themselves, by contrast, are the landscape feature whose floor the trail crosses.
Bobrowe Skały is an eight-metre-high rock formation with three climbing routes of varying difficulty; one has fixed protection points. Unlike the Ścieżka nad Reglami, the focus here is not on a route through named places, but on a single climbing route and its level of difficulty.
MTB trails and their scope
Pasmo Rowerowe Olbrzymy comprises challenging, one-way MTB trails in the municipalities of Jelenia Góra, Piechowice and Podgórzyn. They are intended for advanced and professional mountain bikers. The western Piechowice loop in this trail network runs between Michałowice, Piechowice and Jagniątków and is 19.5 kilometres long. This makes it possible to distinguish the MTB area’s reach across several municipalities and its target group from the specific sequence of places and length of an individual loop.
Tunnel and church
A road tunnel was blasted through granite rock in the 1920s on the winding road between Piechowice and Michałowice. In Piastów stands the Gothic-Baroque branch church of Bożego Ciała, built in the early 16th century. The dates clearly distinguish the buildings: the church was built centuries before the tunnel in the 1920s. Road construction and sacred architecture thus add two different historical perspectives to the nature and activity themes.
Discover more destinations: Sosnówka K Jeleniej Góry, Mysłakowice, Podgorzyn, Bukowiec, Karpniki, Dziwiszów, Borowice, Ściegny.
For the wider travel overview: Jeleniogórski.
