Rybnik Coal Area

The Rybnik Coal Area is an industrial region in southern Poland. It is located in the Silesian Voivodeship, in a basin between the Vistula and Oder rivers, sited on the Rybnik Plateau between Katowice to the north and Ostrava on the south-west. It is part of the Katowice-Ostrava metropolitan area populated by 5,294,000 people and the populated by about 7 million. According to scientific description by Paweł Swianiewicz and Urszula Klimska this area has 507,000 people, according to European Spatial Planning Observation Network - 634,000 people. Area: about 1,300 km².

Main cities

Adjacent main cities and statistics :

Adjacent county and statistics :

County	Population	Area	Density
Wodzisław County
Rybnik city-county
Racibórz County
Jastrzębie-Zdrój city-county
Rybnik County
Żory city-county
Total

The beginnings of ROW are related to a six-year plan and the modernization of nine old hard coal mines in the Rybnik-wodzisław region, e.g. KWK Anna or KWK Marcel. In 1952, the State Economic Planning Commission commissioned work on the preparation of a development plan for ROW. It was planned to build mines in the area of Wodzisław, Żory, Jejkowice and Kaczyce. Therefore, during the six-year plan, the old ones were modernized, but the construction of a new one, the first from scratch, of the 1 Maja Coal Mine in Wodzisław Śląski was started. In the following years, plans were started to build further new mines in ROW.