Attractions in Romania

Bucharest's oldest public park, laid out from 1847 in the landscape style around a lake, with shady avenues, the Writers' Rotunda and romantic stone corners, right in the city centre.

A fairy-tale building of clay, sand, straw, wood and river stone, raised between 2014 and 2017 at the foot of the Făgăraș Mountains. Today it is a restaurant and guesthouse: you enter with a reservation, not a sightseeing ticket.

The royal residence of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, today the seat of the Romanian Presidency and the National Cotroceni Museum: period salons, the king's library, the queen's apartments and Șerban Cantacuzino's rebuilt church.

A small, easy-to-visit cave on the Rucăr–Bran corridor, in Piatra Craiului National Park: a dry gallery carved by the Dâmbovicioara stream, with about 250 m laid out and lit.

An open-air ethnographic museum on the shore of Lake Herăstrău, in the middle of Bucharest: farmsteads, wooden churches, mills and workshops brought from all over the country and rebuilt here since 1936.

Eclectic castle with towers and a moat, rebuilt in 1894–1896 by the Károlyi family in the middle of a three-century-old dendrological park; inside, period interiors, wax figures and African trophies.

The DN7A climbs 108 km from Brezoi up the Lotru valley, through Voineasa and past Lake Vidra to Obârșia Lotrului, then crosses the Groapa Seacă Pass and drops through the Jieț Gorge to Petroșani.

A 14th-century Gothic church built by the noble Apafi family, with the largest ensemble of Gothic frescoes in Transylvania and a polyptych altarpiece that has stood in place for more than five centuries.

An inn from 1808, built by the merchant and diplomat Manuc Bei beside the Old Court: a listed building with an inner courtyard and wooden balconies, where the 1812 Russo-Turkish peace talks took place.

A 20–25 m, two-tier waterfall hidden in a narrow valley of giant boulders and spruce on the western slope of the Vlădeasa massif; reached on foot from Stâna de Vale along a marked trail of about 8 km.

A romantic park of nearly 100 hectares designed by the Frenchman Édouard Redont and inaugurated in 1903, with a lake, a suspension bridge, the Enchanted Castle and the zoo, in the south of Craiova.

A Dacian fortress on top of a rocky hill above Luncani, with an ancient paved road of stone steps and tower ruins hidden in the forest; a UNESCO site, far from the crowds.

The Church of the Holy Archangels in Rogoz, built in 1663 and part of the Maramureș UNESCO site, has an asymmetric roof over the 'table of the ancestors', horse-head eaves brackets and paintings from 1785.

A wild waterfall on the Ieduțul stream, hidden among ferns and fir trees above the Iad Valley, a quarter of an hour's walk through the forest from the road between Stâna de Vale and Lake Leșu.

A narrow limestone gorge in the Piatra Mare Mountains near Brașov, with seven rock steps climbed on metal ladders and walkways; at the top you can ride a zip line back down.