Polish city of Lublin received record half million foreign visitors in 2025

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

The city of Lublin in eastern Poland welcomed a record 2.2 million visitors in 2025, including over half a million from abroad, which was also the highest ever figure.

Brits, Israelis and Americans were the most common foreign visitors to Lublin, which has a long and rich history, including once being one of the most important centres of Jewish life and culture in the world.

The figures confirm that Lublin, which will be a European Capital of Culture in 2029, “is strengthening its position as an attractive tourist destination in Poland and Europe”, declared deputy mayor Mariusz Banach.

The overall number of visitors – which includes those on day trips or staying overnight – was up 15% on 2024. The total of 506,000 foreign visitors was 18% higher than a year earlier and over ten times more than in 2022.

Poland as a whole has also seen a boom in tourism in recent years. In 2025, the number of nights spent in tourist accommodation rose 7%, which was the second-highest growth in any European Union country, behind only the Mediterranean island state of Malta.

With a population of 330,000, making it the largest city in eastern Poland and the eighth-biggest in the country as a whole, Lublin boasts a picturesque Old Town featuring several historic churches as well as the adjacent Lublin Castle.

The city, where before the Holocaust Jews made up over a third of the population, also hosts a number of sites of Jewish heritage, as well as the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, set up by the Nazi-German occupiers during World War Two.

Lublin featured prominently in the 2024 Oscar-nominated film A Real Pain, directed by and starring Jesse Eisenberg, whose ancestors were Jews from Lublin and the nearby town of Krasnystaw. Eisenberg, who received Polish citizenship last year, has called Lublin his favourite city in Poland.

Around 42% of the international visitors in 2025 came from the United Kingdom (213,000), followed by Israel (126,000), the United States (51,000) and Germany (31,000). Among the total of 506,000 foreign visitors, 48,000 stayed for at least one night.

The figures, which are compiled for Lublin city hall and tourist office based on analysis of geolocation data, also showed 570,000 Ukrainians recorded in Lublin last year, including 47,000 who stayed for at least one night.

However, the city notes that it has in recent years chosen not to include Ukrainians in the visitor figures, given that generally their “movement was migratory in nature”. Ukrainians are by far Poland’s largest immigrant group and, like other Polish cities, Lublin has hosted many Ukrainian refugees since 2022.

However, “four years after the outbreak of the full-scale war, the number of [Ukrainian] arrivals has stabilised, suggesting that these are people [now] visiting Lublin for tourism, research, business, health, or shopping, or travelling in transit”, added the city.

Of the 1.69 million domestic visitors to Lublin last year, the largest number came from the Masovia province, which is where Warsaw, Poland’s capital, is located and which is relatively close to Lublin. For the first time, more Masovians visited the city than people from the surrounding Lublin province.

The city’s airport last year served 471,000 passengers, the highest number since it opened in 2012.  On Thursday, low-cost carrier Ryanair, which is Poland’s biggest airline by passenger numbers, announced that it will run a record six connections from Lublin this summer, to destinations in Poland, Italy, Spain, Ireland and the UK.

Kraków remains Poland’s most popular tourist destination. In 2024, it was visited by almost eight million tourists who stayed for at least one night, including 1.5 million from abroad.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Wikimedia/Rafał Michałowski (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ben Koschalka

Ben Koschalka is a translator, lecturer, and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.