Łódź The third-largest city in Poland

Main characteristics Located in the central part of the country, it had a population of habitants in It´s a famous city due to the grand Piotrkowska Street, Europe’s largest urban forest, Jewish cementery and old & modern industrial sites. Łódź hosts three major state-owned universities, six higher education establishments operating for more than a half of the century and a number of smaller schools of higher education.

History Łódź first appears in the written record in a 1332 document giving the village of Łodzia to the bishops of Włocławek. In 1423, King Władysław Jagiełło granted city rights to the village of Łódź. From then until the 18th century, the town remained a small settlement on a trade route between Masovia and Silesia. In the 16th century, the town had fewer than 800 inhabitants, mostly working on the nearby grain farms.

Some photos of the city

Economy Recent years has seen many foreign companies opening offices in Łódź. Indian IT company Infosys has one of its centres in Łódź. Despite the fact that Łódź is regarded to be the poorest among Polish cities with population over 500,000, the GDP per capita in Łódź was 123.9% of Poland's average (2008).

In January 2009, Dell announced that it will shift production from its plant in Limerick, Ireland to its plant in Łódź, largely because the labor costs in Poland are a fraction of those in Ireland. The city's investor friendly policies have attracted 980 foreign investors by January Foreign investment was one of the factors which decreased the unemployment rate in Łódź to 6.5 percent in December 2008, from 20 percent four years earlier.

Tourism The Piotrkowska Street which remains the high-street and main tourist attraction in the city, runs north to south for a little over five kilometres. Łódź has one of the best museums of modern art in Poland, Muzeum Sztuki, on Więckowskiego and Ogrodowa Street which displays a 20th and 21st century art collection. The heart of the collection, setting its historical and aesthetic roots, is the International Collection of Modern Art of the avant-garde. In 1956, a monument in memory of the victims of the Łódź Ghetto, by Muszko was erected at the cemetery. The Jewish Cemetery at Bracka Street, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, was established in 1892.

Made by Attila Nagy and Alberto Rodríguez Durán