Introduction
Brașov county sits at the inner curve of the Carpathian arc in central Romania, and it is the country's most visited region by a wide margin. Its reputation rests on a hilltop castle and a ski resort; what it actually holds is one of Europe's great small Gothic cities, two UNESCO-listed fortified Saxon villages and a limestone ridge that is the finest day-walking in the country.
Overview
Almost every Romanian itinerary passes through here, and most of them see about a third of what the county offers. Brașov city is the anchor and deserves to be: a compact Saxon foundation ringed by wooded mountains, with a vast late-Gothic church at its centre, a wide square of pastel merchant houses, surviving gates and bastions, and a cable car up the mountain that rises directly behind the old town. It is walkable, well supplied with places to eat and drink, and the natural base for everything else. Half an hour south, the castle that appears on every tour brochure draws enormous crowds to a genuinely picturesque building whose famous association is a marketing one — worth an hour if you are curious, and not the reason to be in this county. What is the reason sits in two other directions. East and north, the fortified Saxon villages of Prejmer and Viscri preserve something that exists nowhere else: entire village churches ringed by defensive walls with storerooms built into them, where each family kept a chamber for siege supplies, and both are UNESCO-listed and still quietly in use. West, the Piatra Craiului ridge rises as a thin blade of limestone above the town of Zărnești, offering the best accessible mountain walking in Romania and, in the forests around it, the country's most established guided bear-watching. Add the ski slopes above the city and a well-preserved fortress on a hill, and it is easy to see why people stay a week.
Discover Brașov
The city was founded by Saxon settlers and it still reads that way — a tight medieval street plan enclosed by the remains of walls and towers, with the mountains coming down to the edge of the old town. Its centrepiece is the Black Church, a very large late-Gothic hall church whose name comes from a seventeenth-century fire that blackened its walls, and which holds a substantial collection of Anatolian carpets given by merchants over the centuries, hanging along the nave in a way that is unlike any other European church interior. The Council Square in front of it is the social centre: a wide open rectangle of pastel-fronted merchant houses with the old council building in the middle. Around them, the surviving fortifications are walkable — the White and Black towers on the slope above, Catherine's Gate with its distinctive turrets, and long stretches of wall along the base of the mountain. One much-photographed curiosity is a passage between two buildings barely wide enough for one person, originally a firefighters' access route. Above everything, a cable car climbs Mount Tâmpa in a few minutes to a viewpoint over the whole basin, and the walking path up through the beech forest beside it takes about an hour if you prefer to earn it.
Ways to Experience This Destination
A Saxon city of walls, gates and towers around a vast late-Gothic church hung with Anatolian carpets, under a cable-car mountain.
Prejmer's tiered siege chambers, one per village family, and Viscri's whitewashed church at the top of an unpaved street.
A twenty-five-kilometre limestone knife-edge with gorge walks, chamois and the best accessible day hiking in Romania.
The marketed hilltop castle, the quieter and better citadel at Râșnov, and Romania's best-known ski resort above the city.
Frequently asked questions
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