The 8 strongest castles in Poland

The largest castle on earth by land area, Malbork's High, Middle and Lower castles enclose some twenty-one hectares of brick behind concentric rings of wall, dry moat and gatehouse, the fortified capital the Teutonic Order built to run a crusader state. The wards were layered so that storming the outer defences only left an attacker exposed beneath the next wall.

It was never taken by storm. When Poland and Lithuania besieged it in 1410 after their victory at Grunwald, Heinrich von Plauen held the walls from 26 July until the siege collapsed in dysentery and quarrelling that September. Malbork left the Order's hands only in 1457, and not to an army: its own unpaid Bohemian mercenaries sold the castle to the Polish crown.

Ogrodzieniec crowns Castle Mountain at 515 metres, the highest point of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, its walls grown straight out of the limestone crags so that on several sides the living rock is the rampart. The Boner family rebuilt it in the 16th century as a fortified Renaissance seat, and the early 17th century wrapped it in an outer belt of bastioned earthworks.

For all its position, its war record is a defeat. In 1655 the army of Charles X Gustav plundered and then occupied it for nearly two years during the Swedish Deluge, and in 1702 the retreating troops of Charles XII fired the interiors. It never recovered, and has stood a ruin ever since.

Będzin was the westernmost stone castle in the chain Casimir the Great built along the Bohemian-Silesian frontier, operational by 1348 to close the invasion road into Lesser Poland. A four-storey cylindrical keep, entered high on the third floor, rose over curtain walls of crushed limestone on a hill above the Czarna Przemsza, purpose-built for war rather than residence.

Its strategic value was real, but so was its exposure once armies came in force. In the 1655 Swedish Deluge the castle was occupied and badly damaged, and fire the same year left it a shell; it was not rebuilt until the following decade, and what stands today owes much to restorations of the 1850s and 1950s.

Niedzica guards the old Hungarian-Polish border above the Dunajec gorge, set on a crag with steep cliffs on three sides and a tiered plan of upper, middle and lower wards behind walls, towers and a moat. The natural position is its real strength, but it was fought over hard and did not always hold. In late 1528 Nicholas Kostka's Vlachs and freebooters took it by storm and cut down its defender, the starosta Stephen Potturniański; German troops recaptured it in 1529, and in 1533 a band of Czech and German robber-knights seized it yet again. Compact but authentically medieval, it is one of the few castles of the Carpathian foothills to survive largely intact.

Czocha began as a 13th-century Bohemian border fortress on a rocky spur above the Kwisa, its great tower and curtain walls later stiffened with Renaissance bastions. Its medieval record is genuinely good: it turned back Hussite assaults in the early 15th century, briefly lost to a raiding party in 1427 and swiftly retaken, and its reinforced walls saw off a Swedish siege during the Thirty Years' War. The stronghold that fought those sieges, though, is mostly gone: fire gutted it in 1793, and the dramatic silhouette visitors see today is largely a neo-Gothic reconstruction carried out for the tobacco magnate Ernst Gütschow between 1912 and 1920 by the architect Bodo Ebhardt. The towers above the lake are twentieth-century.

Bobolice is a rock castle of the Eagles' Nests, raised around 1350 by Casimir the Great on a limestone crag to help watch the Silesian border, with the outcrop itself doing much of the defensive work. Its active life was short: Swedish forces wrecked it in 1657, by 1683 it was ruinous enough that John III Sobieski's men reportedly camped in tents below rather than within it, and 19th-century treasure-hunters finished the demolition. What stands now is not a survivor of those wars but a full reconstruction completed in 2011, raised from the ruins and archaeological guesswork without surviving plans, a plausible medieval outline rather than original fabric.

Lublin's genuinely old element is its keep, a squat cylindrical Romanesque donjon of the mid-13th century, built within earlier ramparts on a hill commanding the eastern approaches and reinforced by Casimir the Great after the Tatar raids of the 1340s. The medieval castle was battered repeatedly, worst of all in 1648-1657 by Cossack, Muscovite, Swedish and Transylvanian armies, and never recovered as a working fortress. The long neo-Gothic range around the keep is not a stronghold at all but a prison, built in 1826-1828 under Russian rule and used to jail Polish insurgents for well over a century. Keep and chapel are medieval; the rest is a 19th-century penal rebuild.

Wawel earns its place at the foot of a fortress ranking honestly: it is first a royal palace and cathedral, and only secondarily a stronghold. The hill is the strongest thing about it, a limestone bluff with cliffs above the Vistula, ringed by walls, gates and towers, defence enough to shelter Kraków's people through the Mongol raids of 1241 and 1259-60, neither of which took the height. Against gunpowder armies it fared worse: after a siege in the autumn of 1655 the city capitulated to Charles X Gustav in the Deluge, and from 1795 the occupying Austrians gutted the royal apartments and turned the castle into barracks. A magnificent seat of kings, but not a fortress built to outlast a siege.