Motorisation Museum at Topacz Castle

Muzeum Motoryzacji, a museum of cars and motorcycles at Topacz Castle in Ślęza, outside Wrocław.

The castle at Ślęza seen across a lawn: a long cream house with a red tiled roof and stepped gables, beside a tall brick tower with a dark pyramid roof, framed by large trees under a blue sky.

Takasamarasa Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 pl

What it is

The Motorisation Museum (Muzeum Motoryzacji) is a museum of cars and motorcycles at Topacz Castle (Zamek Topacz), in Ślęza, outside Wrocław.

The castle is also a hotel, with a conference centre and a spa; the museum is one of the things it offers.

Ślęza is a village in the municipality (gmina) of Kobierzyce. The museum is in a restored farm building of the castle’s estate.

The castle

The oldest part of Topacz Castle is a medieval residential tower of brick, built on a mound surrounded by a moat. In German the village and its manor were called Lohe. Later owners raised the tower and added a wing in the mannerist style, joined to it by a stair tower. The manor with its tower has been in the register of monuments since 1960.

In the early 19th century the estate belonged to the von Königsdorff family. In the second half of the 19th century it grew sugar beet for the Klecina sugar factory in Wrocław.

The castle’s website, following the 19th-century writer Alexander Duncker, says that the Templars built the tower. The city’s history article calls this the less likely version: archaeologists and historians have found no trace of the Templars here.

After 1945 the state made the estate a prison, and in the 1950s the prisoners were put to growing rice. From 1972 it was run by an agricultural centre, the Wojewódzki Ośrodek Postępu Rolniczego “Wysoka”.

Since 2006 the estate has belonged to the company Topacz Investments, which carried out a general renovation until 2015. Today the castle is a hotel with a spa and a restaurant, in a park of about fifty hectares; in winter the park carries light installations (Lumina Park).

Photographs by Aw58, Fallaner, Strumyczek and Takasamarasa. Open any photograph for its full credit and licence.

The collection

The museum shows more than a hundred exhibits: cars and motorcycles from the interwar years, vehicles from the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL), and a collection of Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars.

The collection includes the Fiat 508 and the Sokół 1000 from the 1930s, and the Mikrus, the Syrena, the Warszawa and the Nysa from the People’s Republic.

Among the foreign makes is Buick.

Photographs by Jakub "flyz1" Maciejewski. Open any photograph for its full credit and licence.

The museum hires out some of its cars for weddings. Every August the castle’s park hosts Motoclassic Wrocław, a rally of historic vehicles; its dates are on the event’s own site.

The park and the pond

The grounds include a pond for kayaking and a golf driving range.

Photographs by Wojciech Owczarek. Open any photograph for its full credit and licence.

Before you go

Opening days, hours and ticket prices are on the museum’s page on the castle’s website, in Polish; the museum’s old address, muzeum.topacz.pl, now leads to the castle’s site. The city’s other museums are on one page.

The museum is in the castle’s grounds, on ul. Templariuszy; its page gives the address ul. Templariuszy 1, Ślęza, 55-040 Kobierzyce. Older listings give ul. Główna 12; the municipality’s list of monuments (2024) gives the same register entry at ul. Templariuszy 1.

Checked 17 October 2026 The museum’s own page lists opening days, hours and prices, but no other current source confirms them and older pages disagree; hours and prices change, so this page gives none. Check with the museum before you go.

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