Introduction
Alba county sits in western Transylvania where the plateau meets the Apuseni mountains, and it holds three sites that have nothing to do with one another and no equivalent elsewhere in Romania: an eighteenth-century star fortress, a Roman gold-mining landscape cut by hand into a mountain, and a cave containing a permanent underground glacier.
Overview
Alba Iulia is the county town and the reason most people stop. Its citadel is a Vauban-style bastion fortress laid out in the early eighteenth century as a seven-pointed star, and it is among the largest and most completely preserved of its kind anywhere — which matters because the shape only reads properly when you walk it. The full circuit of the ramparts takes an hour or two, passing through a sequence of monumental baroque gates, and the enclosure inside holds a Roman Catholic cathedral that is the oldest in the country, a large early-twentieth-century Orthodox cathedral, museums and a good deal of open ground. Extensive restoration has left it in unusually good condition, and it is free to walk. West of the town the land rises into the Apuseni, and two very different things sit up there. Roșia Montană is a mining landscape where Roman engineers drove galleries into the mountain to extract gold, working by hand with hammer, chisel and fire, and several kilometres of those trapezoidal tunnels survive and are visitable — a UNESCO-listed site and a genuinely strange place to stand inside. Further into the range, the Scărișoara cave holds a block of ice that has been there for thousands of years, one of the largest underground ice bodies in the world, reached by a descent into a collapsed shaft. The rest of the county is vineyards on the Târnave hills, a village of white houses under a limestone crag that is among the prettiest in Transylvania, and the northern end of one of Romania's great mountain roads.
Discover Alba
The citadel at Alba Iulia was built in the first half of the eighteenth century in the Vauban idiom — the French bastion system that replaced medieval walls once artillery made them obsolete — and it was laid out as a seven-pointed star with angled bastions covering every approach. That geometry is the whole interest, and it is a shape you experience by walking rather than by looking: the ramparts run for kilometres, the angles cut back and forth, and the ditch and outworks between them make a landscape rather than a wall. Six monumental baroque gates punctuate the circuit, the third of them the most elaborate, carved with figures and reliefs and forming a genuine ceremonial entrance. Inside the enclosure the ground is unusually open for a fortified town, holding a Roman Catholic cathedral begun in the twelfth century and the oldest in Romania, a much larger Orthodox cathedral from the early twentieth, a university, several museums including one in the former officers' quarters, and long lawns. Restoration over the past two decades has been thorough, occasionally to the point of looking new. It is free to enter and walk, and it is at its best early or in the evening when the light rakes across the bastions.
Ways to Experience This Destination
A seven-pointed Vauban star fortress with kilometres of ramparts, six baroque gates and Romania's oldest cathedral inside — free to walk.
UNESCO-listed mining landscape with kilometres of hand-cut trapezoidal tunnels, still carrying the tool marks, open with a guide.
A permanent underground glacier thousands of years old, reached by stairs down a collapsed shaft into a natural cold trap.
Karst mountains of gorges and high farmsteads, a village of white houses under a limestone crag, and the Târnave wine hills.
Frequently asked questions
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