Cluj

This is the county's headline and it deserves to be. Salt was extracted here from at least the medieval period until commercial working stopped in the 1930s, leaving a series of vast excavated chambers in exceptionally stable rock salt. Rather than seal them, the site was reopened as a visitor attraction, and the interior is genuinely startling: bell-shaped and rectangular halls a hundred metres and more below ground, walls scored with the marks of hand extraction, hung with long vertical light fittings that make the space feel engineered for the purpose rather than adapted. In the main chamber there is a Ferris wheel, an amphitheatre, mini-golf, table tennis and a bowling lane. A lower chamber holds an underground lake with a small island, where you can hire a rowing boat and paddle in near silence under a hundred metres of rock. The air is used therapeutically for respiratory conditions, and the temperature holds around ten to twelve degrees year-round, so a jacket is needed whatever the weather above. It is excellent with children and it is one of the most photographed interiors in the country. Go on a weekday if you can; weekends bring a domestic crowd. A few kilometres away, the Turda gorge is a narrow limestone canyon with a marked path through it and a good two-hour walk between vertical walls.

Cluj-Napoca's centre is compact and best approached as a place to spend evenings rather than to tick off. Union Square is dominated by St Michael's Church, a large fourteenth-century Gothic hall church standing free in the middle of the open space with a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic tower, and beside it an equestrian monument that is the city's standard meeting point. Around the square are the art museum in a baroque palace, a house identified as the birthplace of a fifteenth-century Hungarian king, and streets running off into a quarter of cafés and bookshops. The botanical garden south of the centre is unusually good and worth an hour. The tailors' bastion survives from the walls, and the hill above the city — reached on foot in twenty minutes — gives the standard panorama. But the substance of a visit here is the present: terraces full from mid-afternoon, a serious independent coffee scene, galleries and clubs in a converted factory district, and a student population large enough to set the tone of the whole city. A very large electronic music festival takes over the centre for several days each summer and transforms the place, which is either the reason to come or the week to avoid. The city is also visibly bilingual, with Hungarian widely spoken and its own theatre and opera — the Mureș guide sets out how that shift works across Transylvania rather than repeating it here.

West of the city the Apuseni mountains rise as a broad karst massif, and they are among the least visited walking areas in the country. This is limestone country: gorges, sinkholes, disappearing rivers, and a large number of caves, several of which are open to visitors with guides and a few of which hold permanent ice. The plateaux above carry scattered farmsteads at surprising altitude, and the sense of emptiness is the point. It is proper mountain country rather than a park with facilities, so go with a map, a plan and awareness that services are thin. Closer to the city, the Hoia forest on its north-western edge has acquired an international reputation for paranormal folklore, which has made it a curiosity destination; taken simply as a forest it is a pleasant walk with an unusual clearing and some peculiarly bent trees, and it is easy to reach on foot from the edge of town. Elsewhere in the county, a large reservoir at Tarnița is where the city swims and kayaks in summer, and the medieval salt-trading town of Dej and the spa at Cojocna fill out a slower second day for anyone with a car.

Cluj sits at the north-western corner of the Transylvanian loop, which puts it naturally on the route between the Saxon towns and Maramureș — and the trip-planning guide treats it as the hinge between the two, the point where an itinerary turns north. Two nights is right: an afternoon and evening in the city, a day for Turda and the gorge. It is also the best place in Romania after the capital to arrive or depart internationally, with an airport carrying a reasonable spread of European routes, which makes an open-jaw trip — into Bucharest, out of Cluj, or the reverse — a genuinely good way to avoid retracing the length of the country. Practically, the city is the easiest place in Romania to be a visitor: English is widely spoken because of the students and the technology sector, the food scene is the best outside Bucharest, and accommodation is plentiful and reasonable except during the summer festival, when it is neither. Spring and early autumn are the pleasant windows; the city works year-round in a way the mountain counties do not.