Romania: Europe’s Last Great Wilderness, and Its Most Misunderstood Country
Forget the tired clichés. Behind them is a land of bear-filled mountains, fortified Saxon villages and some of the warmest people on the continent.
No country in Europe is more weighed down by lazy clichés than Romania, and almost none repays ignoring them so handsomely. Set the vampire jokes and the tired stereotypes aside, travel with an open mind and a little curiosity, and you find one of the most extraordinary countries on the continent: a place of genuine wilderness, medieval villages frozen in time, painted monasteries, fierce hospitality and prices that feel like a decade ago. Romania asks you to arrive without preconceptions. Do that, and it will be one of the best trips you take.
Transylvania is real, and it’s magnificent
Transylvania is a real region, and it is glorious — a high plateau of rolling green hills, ringed by the Carpathian mountains and dotted with fortified Saxon churches and walled towns built by German settlers eight centuries ago. Brașov, Sibiu and Sighișoara are handsome, cobbled and storybook-pretty, all pastel facades and watchtowers. Yes, you can visit Bran Castle, marketed hard on the Dracula connection; treat it as a fun bit of theatre rather than the point. The real Transylvania is the quiet villages, the horse-carts still working the fields, the sense of having stepped somewhere older and slower.
The Carpathians, where the wild things actually are
Here is the headline insight: Romania holds some of the largest tracts of untouched forest, and the biggest populations of brown bears, wolves and lynx, anywhere in Europe outside Russia. The Carpathians are a genuine wilderness, threaded by the spectacular Transfăgărășan mountain road and home to vast old-growth forests of a kind that have all but vanished elsewhere on the continent. For anyone who thought Europe had no wild left, Romania is a revelation — bring good boots and a sense of adventure.
A note on travelling fairly here
A brief, sincere word. Romania is sometimes described in unkind generalisations, and the decent traveller leaves those firmly at the border. You’ll meet people across the country whose warmth and generosity to strangers genuinely stand out, even by the high standards of the region. Judge places, not peoples; accept the cup of coffee or the lift that’s offered; and you’ll be rewarded with the kind of human encounters that make a trip. The infrastructure can be patchy and the rural roads slow — that’s the honest friction — but the welcome more than makes up for it.
The painted monasteries and the wooden villages
In the northeast, the region of Bucovina holds a cluster of 15th- and 16th-century monasteries whose exterior walls are covered, top to bottom, in vivid frescoes that have survived 500 years of weather — among the most remarkable religious art in Europe, and gloriously uncrowded. Elsewhere, in the Maramureș region near the northern border, life still moves to a rural rhythm of wooden churches with needle spires and elaborately carved gates. This is the Europe people assume no longer exists. It does. It’s just in Romania.
Come without the clichés
Romania’s rough edges are real — the roads, the bureaucracy, the slow pace of change in places — but they are the texture of a country that hasn’t been sanded down for visitors, and they are vastly outweighed by what’s on offer: wilderness, history, art, warmth and value, in quantities that put far more famous destinations to shame. Come without the clichés, travel generously, and Romania will quietly become one of your favourite countries in Europe. Most people never give it the chance. Be one of the ones who does.