Wroclaw tourist information

Situated at a long existing trading place, a city was first recorded in the 10th century as Vratislavia (Wratislaw) (the origin of its various later names) after Vratislav I. The settlement was conquered by the Piast duke Mieszko I in the 990s. Already a place of some importance, it became the capital of Silesia in 1138, where Silesians had founded a settlement south of the river. During the Mongol invasion in 1241 most of the population of the city was evacuated. The settlement was then sacked and burned by the Mongols, but they had no time to besiege the castle where the rest of the burghers found refuge.

After the demise of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, Prussia became a member of the German Confederation with only all these territories inhabited by Germans. In 1813 the King of Prussia, Frederick William III gave a speech "An mein Volk" ("to my people") at Breslau as a signal that Prussia would join Russia in fighting Napoleon. Two years before, in 1811, the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität (Breslau University) was reestablished. In 1871 Germany was unified. Breslau became the sixth largest city of Imperial Germany and a major industrial centre, notably of linen and cotton manufacture, more than tripling in population between 1860 and 1910 to over half a million. New Germans from the west came to Breslau, as well as Polish immigrant workers and their families, which led to the construction of Polnisch Neudorf suburb. Breslau municipal boundaries were greatly extended in 1928.

Many of the city's 10,000 Jews were killed during the Nazi genocide of World War II. As the Red Army was approaching the city in February 1945, Breslau was declared a fortress by the fanatical Nazi Gauleiter Hanke. When it was almost already too late, he finally stopped preventing the evacuation of the women and children. During his poorly organised evacuation of German women and children in early March, temperatures were about -20°C. In the icy snowstorms, around 18,000 froze to death, mostly children and young babies. Some 200,000 German civilians remained in the city, as the railway connection to the west was damaged and overloaded. To build fortifications, slave labour was needed to augment civilian workers, and concentration camp prisoners were forced to help.

Gradually the old city was restored to its beauty. Nearly all of the monumental buildings were preserved. Now it is a uniquely European city, located in present-day Poland, with its architecture echoing that in Austria, Bohemia, or Prussia. Wroclaw's Gothic style is originally Silesian; its Baroque style owes much to court builders of Habsburg Austria (Fischer von Erlach, Ch. Tausch); and Wroclaw still has a number of buildings by eminent German modernist architects, such as Hans Poelzig or Max Berg, the famous Jahrhunderthalle (Hala Ludowa) by Berg (1911–13) being the most important.

In July 1997, the city was hit by a severe flooding of the Oder River. In 2005, the city was hit by a freak storm that felled a number of trees and killed three people. The storm was local and did not affect any other major cities.