I recently took a short trip to Gdańsk with friends. Here are some of the sights I saw around this incredible city!

Relatively speaking, the Motława is a rather small river at only 42 miles in length. That's about the length of the River Taff that runs through Cardiff. Yet similarly to Cardiff on the Taff, Gdańsk on the Motława was long used for trade and shipbuilding. Evidence of this can be seen on the right of this picture with the Gdańsk Medieval Crane, first built in the 1440s and rebuilt in the 1950s. Given its importance on the Baltic Sea, it is a city that has long been contested by regional powers, including Danes, Germans, Swedes, and naturally the Poles themselves, to whom Gdańsk was the principal naval port of their medieval kingdom. Evidence of that can be seen on the left of this picture in St. Mary's Gate, one of the principal city gates built in the 15th century and rebuilt in the 1950s (are you sensing a pattern here?).

Perhaps more famously, control over Gdańsk - or more accurately, the Free City of Danzig - was the flashpoint for the German-Polish War of 1939 and the site of its first battle, which subsequently spiralled into the Second World War. These days, despite tension caused by the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast about 40 miles to the east, the city is a much more peaceful and prosperous place, with a wealth of things to see and do.

Hope you enjoy!