Bucharest
- Key Areas:Calea Victoriei — the belle époque avenue and its museums · Lipscani — the restored old commercial quarter and its nightlife · Around the university — quieter streets, bookshops and cafés · The northern districts — lakes, parks and leafy residential villas
Overview
Bucharest is Romania's capital and by a wide margin its largest city, sitting on the southern plain a couple of hours below the Carpathians. It is not a preserved historic capital and does not pretend to be — it is a working city of grand boulevards, leafy villa streets and enormous set pieces, and it rewards two days and the right expectations.
Travel
Arrive expecting Prague or Vienna and Bucharest will disappoint you within an hour. Arrive expecting a large, energetic, uneven European capital with pockets of real beauty and it becomes one of the more interesting stops in the region. The city was largely built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Romanian architects trained in Paris gave it wide boulevards, ornate apartment blocks and streets of detached villas behind iron railings — the source of a long-standing nickname it has never quite shaken off. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, a vast programme of construction drove new boulevards and monumental blocks through the middle of that fabric, and the two now sit alongside each other in a way that has no real parallel elsewhere. Walking here means passing from a boulevard of enormous scale into a side street of crumbling and half-restored villas with roses in the front gardens, and back again. What visitors come to see is mostly the big stuff: the immense administrative palace at the head of a ceremonial avenue, the restored old-town quarter of Lipscani with its bars and restaurants, and the concert hall and museums along the belle époque spine of Calea Victoriei. What people actually enjoy is the other city — the parks, the courtyards, the café terraces, the bookshops, and an open-air museum of transplanted village houses on a lake in the north that is among the best things in Romania.
The old north-south avenue is where the nineteenth-century city concentrated its ambitions, and walking its length is the best single introduction to Bucharest. Along it stand the Romanian Athenaeum, a domed circular concert hall from the 1880s built by public subscription and holding a circular fresco of the country's history around its auditorium, with an interior worth seeing on a tour even if you are not attending a concert; the former royal palace, now the National Museum of Art, whose Romanian medieval and modern collections are the best in the country; and a run of grand hotels, ministries and merchant palaces in varying states of restoration. Around the avenue the streets hold the city's most characteristic sight, which is not a monument at all: belle époque and interwar villas, some immaculately restored as embassies or offices, others visibly failing, with ironwork balconies, plaster mouldings and overgrown gardens. The contrast between the two conditions on a single street is the visual signature of Bucharest. Cișmigiu Gardens, the oldest public park in the city, sits just off the avenue and is where to sit down when the walking has done its work.
Frequently asked questions
Diplomatic missions in Bucharest
3 embassies based in this city, grouped by region.
This overview comes from Visaja's worldwide missions database (visaja.com), checked against official government sources; for binding answers, the mission itself always has the final word.