  {Results from a long-term observational project called the Araucaria Project
are presented. Based on Wide Field optical monitoring of 8 nearby galaxies,
covering a large range of metallicities, more than 500 Cepheids and a few
hundred Blue Supergiant candidates were identified. From the analysis of
Cepheid P-L relations of outstanding quality derived from our data we conclude
that the slope of these relations in the I band and Wesenheit index are not
dependent on metallicity. Comparing the I-band magnitudes of Cepheids of a
period of ten days, as computed from our P-L relations, to the I-band
magnitudes of the tip of the RGB, which is widely believed to be independent of
population effects, we cannot see any obvious dependence of the zero point of
the I-band P-L relation on metallicity. A preliminary analysis of IR follow-up
observations of sub-samples of the identified Cepheids in various galaxies of
the project show that the distances obtained from these data are systematically
shorter by about of 0.1 mag than those derived from the optical photometry. It
is likely that this effect can be attributed to the internal reddening in the
program galaxies.
