The Warsaw Barbican was built in the 1540s as part of the brick fortifications encircling the Old Town, a three-storey gatehouse connected to the city by a drawbridge. It was rendered obsolete almost immediately. Advances in artillery, the cannon in particular, made medieval gatehouses like this one redundant within a generation of their construction. It was used in anger only once, during the 1600s. Afterwards, buildings grew up around it, then through it, and it fell into disrepair.

The version standing today is a postwar reconstruction, rebuilt after 1944 like virtually everything else in the Old Town. The walls flanking it are also largely postwar, replacing originals from the 1500s that once guarded a city grown from medieval fishing villages into the commercial heart of Mazovia.

VoiceMap's Old Town tours pass through the Barbican to trace Warsaw's arc from medieval fortified town to wartime rubble to painstaking, UNESCO-listed reconstruction.