Chocholow

Chocholow is a single long street with about a hundred and twenty wooden houses along it, most built in the nineteenth century in the Podhale manner - large horizontal log walls of spruce, high shingled roofs, carved doorframes - and it is the most complete wooden village street in Poland. What it is known for is the washing: traditionally every few years, in spring, the households scrub the outside walls of their houses with water and brushes to take the grey off the timber and return it to pale wood, and the practice continues. The village has a history of resistance - the Chocholow uprising of 1846 against Austrian rule started from here - and a small museum in one of the houses covers it. The church is nineteenth-century. There is now a large thermal bath complex on the edge of the village, which brings traffic and has changed the balance of the place.

What you actually see

• A single wooden street - about a hundred and twenty log houses, mostly nineteenth-century.
• Scrubbed walls - the timber washed pale by hand every few years.
• The 1846 uprising - remembered in a small museum in one of the houses.
• Podhale carpentry - shingled roofs, carved doorframes, spruce log walls.

When to go

May to September; late spring for the washing. Half a day.

Honest expectations

The houses are lived in and private. The thermal baths have brought heavy traffic to the village. The museum keeps short hours. There is little to do beyond walking the street.

Nearby

Zakopane is twenty kilometres east; Czarny Dunajec is north.