If Gdańsk is the history and Gdynia the modern port, Sopot is the pleasure. Wedged between the two, this small resort town has for two centuries been the place where the Baltic coast dresses up: summer villas with towers and wooden balconies, a seafront promenade full of life and the longest wooden pier in Europe reaching out to sea. They call it 'the Polish Riviera', and although the Baltic does not have the turquoise of the Mediterranean, the atmosphere — fine sand, pines, spa and music — earns the nickname.
The heart of Sopot is Bohaterów Monte Cassino street, which locals affectionately call 'Monciak': a pedestrian avenue running down from the station to the sea, lined with cafés, ice cream shops, street performers and the eccentric Crooked House (Krzywy Domek), a building that looks like it came out of a cartoon. At the end is Zdrojowy Square, the 1920s Grand Hotel and the entrance to the molo, from where you see the whole bay and, in the distance, the cranes of the port of Gdańsk.
This guide takes you through Sopot at an unhurried pace: how to get there and get around on the Trójmiasto's SKM train, how much it costs to go onto the pier, where the best beaches are, the lighthouse, the Forest Opera where the legendary song festival is held, and why it makes sense to use the town as a base for exploring the whole coast. It is a destination for rest and the good life, perfect for slotting in between the more 'historical' visits of northern Poland.
Sopot went from a fishing village to a fashionable resort at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the French doctor Jean Georges Haffner — a former surgeon in Napoleon's army — opened the first public baths in 1823 and laid the foundations of the spa town. Under the German name Zoppot, and belonging to Prussia and later the German Empire, it grew as a chic Baltic destination, with a casino, a racecourse and the Grand Hotel. After the First World War it ended up right on the edge of the Free City of Danzig. With the region devastated by the Second World War, Sopot passed to Poland in 1945 and established itself as the country's great seaside resort, home since 1961 to the famous International Song Festival at the Forest Opera. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Poland's window on the sea: the Malbork of the Teutonic Knights, Hanseatic Gdańsk where the Second World War began at Westerplatte and where Solidarity was born in 1980, and the elegant seaside resort of Sopot with its long wooden pier.
Read the history of Pomerania and the Baltic coast →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 10 activities in Gdansk. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the summer villas and the lit-up pier, Sopot was barely a handful of fishermen's houses on the Baltic shore. The name is first documented in 1283, when the Pomeranian duke Mestwin II granted the village of 'Sopot' to the Cistercian monastery of Oliwa, today a district of Gdańsk. For centuries life ran to the rhythm of fishing, forests and farming, in the shadow of the great neighbouring Hanseatic city, Danzig (Gdańsk), one of the richest ports in northern Europe.
Being close to Danzig shaped Sopot's entire fate. As early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the patrician families of the Hanseatic city began building country residences and gardens on this coastal strip of gentle hills and pine woods, seeking sea air and rest away from the bustle of the port. Very gradually, Sopot took shape as a place of retreat and pleasure for the region's wealthy.
The northern wars and the conflicts that shook Poland and Prussia between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries passed through these lands and impoverished them more than once. With the first partition of Poland, in 1772, the area came under the rule of the Kingdom of Prussia. That political change, far from holding Sopot back, would end up pushing it towards its great transformation in the following century: into a fashionable spa resort.
The real founding act of modern Sopot has a date and a protagonist: 1823, and a French doctor named Jean Georges Haffner. Haffner had been a military surgeon in Napoleon's army, and after the wars he settled in Danzig. Convinced of the therapeutic virtues of sea bathing — very much in vogue in nineteenth-century Europe — he pushed for the creation of public baths and a warm bath house in Sopot, laying the foundations of the spa town.
Within a few years the fishing village had turned into an elegant summer destination. A cure house (Kurhaus), promenades, gardens and the first guest villas were built. Under its German name, Zoppot, the place became one of the most popular resorts on the Prussian Baltic, drawing the middle classes of Danzig, of Berlin and of all Germany. Haffner is remembered today as the 'father' of Sopot, and the town keeps his memory in streets and monuments.
The definitive expansion came with the railway. In 1870 the line linking Danzig with Koszalin put a station in Zoppot, which multiplied the number of holidaymakers arriving. The town grew with hotels, restaurants, a first pier (from 1827, extended over the years), a casino and all the services of a high-class resort. In 1901 Zoppot was officially granted town rights. The summer 'season' became a social event, with concerts, bathing, walks along the molo and nightlife.
The first decades of the twentieth century were the golden age of Zoppot/Sopot. The town filled with spa architecture: villas with little towers, wooden galleries and gardens, an open-air amphitheatre in the woods — the future Opera Leśna, opened in 1909 — and all the paraphernalia of belle époque leisure. The resort competed with the great destinations of the Baltic and the North Sea.
The First World War and the German defeat radically changed the map. Under the Treaty of Versailles (1919), Danzig and its surroundings — Sopot included — became the Free City of Danzig (Freie Stadt Danzig), a small semi-autonomous state under the protection of the League of Nations, with a mostly German population but economically tied to Poland. Sopot was thus left on a delicate political frontier, between the German and the Polish worlds.
In those interwar years the town enjoyed a glamorous boom. In 1927 the Grand Hotel opened, a symbol of the luxury of the era, and Sopot's casino attracted gamblers and celebrities from all over Europe: it was compared with Monte Carlo or Baden-Baden. The pier reached its great length and the seafront promenade became a social parade. But tensions of nationalism were growing beneath the shine: in the Free City of Danzig, the Nazi party gained strength during the 1930s, and coexistence between Germans and Poles was poisoned little by little, foreshadowing the catastrophe.
The Second World War began, literally, at Sopot's gates. On 1 September 1939 the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military depot at Westerplatte, in neighbouring Danzig, in what is usually considered the first shot of the conflict in Europe. With the annexation of the Free City of Danzig by the Third Reich, Sopot was absorbed into Nazi Germany.
During the occupation, the Polish and Jewish population of the region was persecuted, expelled or murdered, as across the whole area under Nazi rule. Sopot's Jewish community, which had had its synagogue and a life of its own, was annihilated in the Holocaust. The town, with no major war industries, was spared the worst of the bombing, but the war marked it all the same.
The end came in March 1945, when the Red Army took the area on its advance towards Danzig. The fighting and the fires damaged part of the town, though far less than neighbouring Gdańsk, whose historic centre was reduced to rubble. With the end of the war and the postwar agreements, the whole territory of the former Free City of Danzig passed to Poland. The German population was expelled and replaced by Poles, many of them in turn displaced from the eastern territories Poland lost to the Soviet Union. Zoppot became, definitively, the Polish Sopot.
In postwar communist Poland, Sopot established itself as the country's great seaside resort and as a cultural centre of the first rank. Being less damaged than Gdańsk, it was able to keep much of its holiday architecture, and the state promoted it as a tourist destination for workers and families, with its beaches, its pier and its rest homes.
The great cultural symbol of this period was the Sopot International Song Festival, held for the first time in 1961 and then, for decades, on the stage of the Opera Leśna. At the height of the Iron Curtain, the festival became a showcase of popular music bringing together artists from the Eastern bloc and from the West as well, and an event followed by millions of television viewers. For a time it rivalled other major European contests in importance and carried Sopot's name well beyond Poland's borders.
The town thus kept a cosmopolitan, festive air even under the communist regime. Although the casino and the interwar glamour were long gone, Sopot remained a byword for holidays, music and outdoor life for several generations of Poles. The pier, the promenade and the Forest Opera became part of the national imagination of summer.
After the fall of communism in 1989 and the return of democracy and a market economy, Sopot reinvented itself as one of the chicest and most prosperous destinations in Poland. The town restored its period villas, modernised its hotel and spa offering and again attracted a well-off crowd, recovering part of its elegant interwar air. In 2004 the eccentric Crooked House (Krzywy Domek) opened on Monte Cassino street and became a pop icon of the town, and in 2009 Zdrojowy Square and the pier area were completely remodelled.
Today Sopot combines the best of two worlds: the calm of a historic spa town and the energy of a young, touristy city, part of the dynamic Trójmiasto alongside Gdańsk and Gdynia. The longest wooden pier in Europe is still its great emblem; the Forest Opera continues to host festivals and concerts; and Monte Cassino street never stops in summer, with its cafés, its music and its parade of holidaymakers.
From medieval fishing village to Napoleonic spa, from jewel of the Free City of Danzig to communist resort and, finally, to Polish Riviera of the twenty-first century, Sopot has managed to reinvent itself again and again without losing its essence: a place made for the pleasure of the sea, for rest and for the good life, in the brightest corner of Poland's Baltic coast.
