In the interwar period, the town was a fashionable health resort, popular among the Warsaw intelligentsia. It was famous for its local climate and rich pine woods that were said to help patients suffering from respiratory diseases. Local pensions, wooden houses with spacious verandas, were built in a characteristic style known as Świdermajer.

Before the Second World War, Jews made up almost 75% of the city’s population. In August 1942, they were transported from the Otwock ghetto to an extermination camp in Treblinka.

After the war, the town gradually slid into decline and never regained its former splendor. Pre-war villas, abandoned or inhabited by new owners, fell into disrepair.

The 1950s saw the construction of a villa for the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party and the Head of the Security Service (which is currently home to the local museum). In 1958, the Institute of Nuclear Research in Otwock’s Świerk district launched its own nuclear reactor Ewa.

The privatization and the construction boom that followed after 1989 resulted in even greater urban chaos. The present-day architecture seems accidental and chaotic. In the city center, commercial pavilions erected in the 1960s were turned into a construction site, abandoned now for years. Reinforced concrete foundations of an unfinished retail park remain a bitter reminder of the current condition of the local landscape.