Open Air Museum of Oil Industry ‘Magdalena’ Gorlice

Monuments

Krzewy ozdobne przed kamiennym ogrodzeniem z metalowymi przęsłami, za którym stoi drewniana, wysoka wieża wiertnicza. Za nią po prawo drzewa bez liści. Niebo pogodne.

ul. Lipowa 14, 38-300 Gorlice Tourist region: Beskid Sądecki i Niski

tel. +48 723644117
tel. +48 600491470

Gorlice is not only the City of Light thanks to the world's first street paraffin lamp, lit at the intersection of busy commercial routes in the Gorlice Zawodzie district in 1854. It is also a place hiding a precious treasure – ‘black gold’ ... In the 19th century, Gorlice became the cradle of the oil industry, and hundreds of drilling towers dotted the landscape throughout the Gorlice region. Ignacy Łukasiewicz, the inventor of the paraffin lamp and an authority on petrochemistry, lived here and was visited by entrepreneurs from all over the world. The traditions of the region associated with the Gorlice Oil Industry Basin are documented and presented in the Educational-Historical Open-Air Museum, which opened in 2012 on the site of the former Magdalena oil field in Gorlice.

The open-air museum exhibits memorabilia, tools, equipment, documents and photographs related to the history of oil extraction in Poland, mainly in the Gorlice area. There is a shaft with a wooden drilling and viewing tower from a reconstructed quarry from before 1880, which offers a panoramic view of the Beskid Niski, and a drill forge, where augers for impact drilling were sharpened. The equipment, machinery and tools used more than 100 years ago for extracting oil, such as the Granik-type hand-held device for extracting oil by so-called bucketing and the Granik-type pumping wheel with a process line for group pumping of wells, are in operation. Here, you can see a collection of flasks containing different types of oil from Podkarpackie wells, with various colours, densities, and degrees of transparency. In the smithy, visitors can try to stoke a fire with a bellows, forge a horseshoe on an anvil, extract so-called black gold from the digging pit, watched over by a Gorlice oil worker called a coalfield, and see a reconstruction of the self-flow of rock oil, which used to accumulate in the so-called bęsiory or łapaczki and was collected by coalfields. An educational trail leads through the Open Air Museum. You can hold a barbecue meeting on the grounds or play sports and recreational games, and take fun quizzes.

The Magdalena Open-Air Museum of Oil Industry is an exciting place where the industry's history is combined with education and entertainment. Its former employee and owner, Kazimierz Dudek, reveals to visitors the former history and secrets of the not-so-long-ago closed mine.

During the working life of the Magdalena field, between 1931 and 2000, some 110 wells were drilled, and some 310,000 tonnes of oil were extracted. From 1956 onwards, more wells were sunk in the Magdalena field, including Bystrzyca, Śląsk and Lasek in Szymbark.

The Oil Trail in the Gorlice region leads through 13 towns (Gorlice, Ropica Polska, Szymbark, Ropa, Łosie, Bielanka, Siary, Sękowa, Kryg, Kobylanka, Lipniki, Libusza and Zagórzany). It is part of the Carpathian-Galician Oil Trail, which is the initial section of the cross-border Oil Route running from Gorlice through Jasło, Krosno, Sanok and Ustrzyki Dolne to the territory of Ukraine to Borysław, Drohobych and Lviv.