How long is the Vistula? Length of the longest river in Poland
The Vistula is about 1,047 km (651 miles) long. It is the longest river in Poland, and more than 85% of its basin lies within the country.
Lay the Vistula over your country
The river and a country at one scale. Pick a country, drag the river or switch the globe to the Mercator map.
Vistula: about 1,047 km (651 miles), about 27% of the straight-line distance from New York to Los Angeles (about 3,940 km).
Drag the river with your finger or mouse. It moves over the globe without changing shape or length, and its north stays up. The globe keeps the true proportions; on the Mercator map you can see how a river moved north grows.
Where the Vistula flows
The Vistula begins on the slopes of Barania Góra in the Silesian Beskids, where the Black and the White Vistula streams meet. It flows through Kraków, Warsaw and Toruń and enters the Gulf of Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea.
The Vistula basin covers about 194,500 km², about 168,700 km² of it in Poland and the rest in Belarus, Ukraine and Slovakia. At its mouth the river carries about 1,050 m³/s of water on average. The Nile is more than 6 times longer, and the Amazon carries about 200 times more water.
Rivers of similar length, straightened
Rivers drawn at one scale. Straighten them to compare their lengths and see how they look on a Mercator map.
On a Mercator map: about 1,700 km
On a Mercator map the Vistula looks about 1,700 km long (×1.62 its true length). Its course lies far from the equator, so the map stretches it by about 62%. On a globe and in the tables the difference disappears.
Open the Mercator mapHow long is it really?
The most widely used length is 1,047 km. Other studies give slightly different values, depending on which headstream counts as the source (the Black or the White Vistula) and how the lower channel is measured.
The line on this page's maps is about 949 km long, shorter than the sources say, because a 1:10 million map smooths the bends and the mouth. That is why lengths here come from the sources, not from the drawing.
Vistula: questions and answers
The Vistula is about 1,047 km (651 miles) long. It is the longest river in Poland.
All of it: 1,047 km. The Vistula flows only through Poland, although part of its basin lies in Belarus, Ukraine and Slovakia.
The Vistula begins on the slopes of Barania Góra in the Silesian Beskids, where the Black and the White Vistula streams meet.
The Vistula enters the Gulf of Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea, east of Gdańsk.
Among others Kraków, Sandomierz, Warsaw, Płock, Włocławek, Toruń, Bydgoszcz, Grudziądz and Tczew.