Attractions in Romania

The largest convent in Romania, home to more than 400 nuns, founded in 1785 in a clearing at the foot of the mountains, where the poet Veronica Micle is also buried.

A waterfall of about 15 m on the Vârciorog stream, tucked into a spruce forest below Piatra Grăitoare, near Arieșeni; reached up a wooded valley on foot or by horse cart.

An undeveloped cave in the Bihor Mountains, with ice at the entrance and white formations, where a Neanderthal footprint at least 62,000 years old was found in 1974.

The pass where the DN75 crosses the Bihor Mountains at 1,160 m, between Nucet and Arieșeni: the Vârtop holiday village, ski slopes and trails to Groapa Ruginoasă and Piatra Grăitoare.

A botanical garden of almost 24 hectares in the former park of the Wesselényi castle: a Japanese garden with lakes and pavilions, greenhouses with palms and cacti, aquariums and thousands of tulips in spring.

Vaslui County's museum, in a neoclassical palace that was once a prefecture: archaeology, history, art, local figures, plus an astronomical observatory and planetarium.

An archaeological park laid out on the site of Moldavia's princely court in Vaslui, with the Church of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, a foundation of Stephen the Great from 1490, in the town centre.

A resort on the southern coast, three kilometres north of Mangalia: a recently widened beach, bays closed off by breakwaters, hotels with women's names set around a lake and sulphurous waters used for treatment.

Timișoara's pedestrian esplanade between the Opera in the Palace of Culture and the Metropolitan Cathedral, lined with the Corso palaces and the place where Timișoara was declared the first free city in December 1989.

A monks' skete hidden among fir trees near Neamț Monastery, with a church of 1849–1857 painted on the outside too and the house of Metropolitan Visarion Puiu, where Mihail Sadoveanu lived, now a memorial museum.

An early 17th-century wooden church in the village cemetery, with the best-known depiction of Hell in Maramureș: devils, torments and village sins, painted in 1793–1794.

A boyar wooden church of 1756, founded by the Zătreanu family, with a broad shingle roof, an open porch and a richly carved, gilded iconostasis.

The oak-built Greek Catholic church of Șurdești village, with a 54-metre tower and a total height of 72 metres, one of the tallest old timber buildings in Europe and a UNESCO World Heritage monument.

A wooden church of 1723 with a tall pointed bell tower, a carved rope-like belt and a porch whose balustrade is cut with small hearts, in the Bihor village of Beznea.

A wooden church of 1798 with a low bell tower over the narthex and paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, raised with material from the former Cioara monastery, a place tied to Sofronie of Cioara.