Śląskie Zoo (Silesian Zoological Garden)

Where it sits. Wrocław spreads across the Oder in the Silesian Lowlands, its centre split among a dozen islands and channels and stitched together by well over a hundred bridges. It is Poland's third-largest city, with around 670,000 residents, and the historic capital of Silesia — a region that has belonged to Bohemia, the Habsburgs, Prussia and Germany before becoming Polish in 1945. The city was German Breslau for six centuries, and its expulsion and repopulation after the war, largely by Poles displaced from Lwów, is the single fact that explains its atmosphere: a place whose architecture and whose population have different histories, and which has spent eighty years reconciling them.

Rebuilt from rubble. As Festung Breslau, the city was declared a fortress and held out until 6 May 1945, days after Berlin fell. The siege destroyed something like seventy per cent of the built fabric. What stands today in the Old Town is therefore a mix of survivals, meticulous reconstructions and postwar infill, and learning to read the difference is part of the pleasure. The Rynek, the market square, is one of the largest in Europe at close to four hectares, with a free-standing block of buildings in the middle rather than an empty plaza — the Old Town Hall at its eastern end, with a fifteenth-century astronomical clock and a stepped gable of extraordinary intricacy, is the finest secular Gothic building in Poland. North of it, Ostrów Tumski keeps its gas lamps, lit by hand each evening by a lamplighter in a long coat, and the twin-towered cathedral looms over an island that was the original settlement.

On screen. Steven Spielberg brought Bridge of Spies here in November 2014 and used Wrocław as 1960s East Berlin. The production worked mainly in Nadodrze, the gritty nineteenth-century district north of the Oder that escaped both wartime destruction and postwar modernisation, and dressed Kurkowa, Ptasia and Miernicza streets with period signage, Trabants and snow. A section of the Berlin Wall complete with a Checkpoint Charlie was constructed on a Wrocław street; the sequence in which Tom Hanks's insurance lawyer watches refugees shot at the wall was shot in the city, not in Germany. The logic was straightforward — Berlin has demolished its own Cold War streetscape, while Nadodrze still has intact blocks of soot-darkened brick tenements with original doorways and cobbles. Location scouts have returned repeatedly since for productions needing a plausible pre-1945 German city.

Modernism and the Centennial Hall. East of the centre, Max Berg's Hala Stulecia of 1913 is one of the founding monuments of reinforced-concrete architecture: a ribbed dome spanning sixty-five metres, at the time the largest of its kind anywhere, built for the centenary of the war against Napoleon. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006 and still hosts concerts and congresses, with a multimedia fountain in the grounds and the Japanese Garden and the zoo — home to the Afrykarium, an ambitious aquarium of African aquatic ecosystems — within walking distance. Together with the neighbouring exhibition grounds and the pergola it forms a coherent early-modernist quarter that few visitors reach.

The dwarfs, and other habits. Wrocław's most photographed residents are bronze, ankle-high and scattered by the hundred across pavements, ledges and doorways. They descend from the Orange Alternative, the absurdist anti-communist movement of the 1980s whose activists painted dwarfs over censored graffiti; the first permanent figure appeared in 2001, and the population has since passed six hundred. Hunting them with a map is a genuinely good way to be dragged into districts you would otherwise skip. Other fixtures worth planning around:

• The Panorama Racławicka, an 1894 cyclorama fifteen metres high and a hundred and fourteen long, viewed from a central platform.
• The Aula Leopoldina, the Baroque assembly hall of the University of Wrocław, finished in the early 1730s.
• The Hala Targowa market of 1908, with its parabolic concrete arches and a ground floor of produce stalls.

Getting there and timing. Wrocław has an international airport twelve kilometres from the centre and fast rail links to Kraków, Poznań and Berlin from the Neo-Gothic Główny station. The centre is flat, compact and well served by trams, which makes it one of the easier Polish cities for step-free travel. Late spring and early autumn are the sweet spots; the summer months bring heat and crowds to the Rynek, and February is bleak. The Christmas market in the Rynek and Plac Solny runs from late November and is among the largest in the country.