Bielsko-Biala

Bielsko-Biala is a city county in the Silesian Voivodeship of southern Poland, formed in 1951 by the merger of two formerly separate towns, Bielsko, dating to the thirteenth century, and Biala, founded in the sixteenth century and granted city rights in 1723. As of 31 December 2024 the city had 165,127 residents, the twenty-second largest in Poland, with a metropolitan area of about 335,000, and from 1975 to 1998 it served as capital of the Bielsko-Biala Voivodeship. Known as Little Vienna for its Revivalist and Art Nouveau architecture, the city sits north of the Beskid Mountains and was historically the third largest center of the textile industry in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, today functioning as the administrative, economic, academic and cultural center of the Silesian-Lesser Polish border region.