Introduction
Cluj county sits in north-western Transylvania around Cluj-Napoca, the region's largest city and its unofficial capital. It is the one part of Transylvania that does not lead with its history: a university city with a substantial technology sector, a young population and, half an hour south, the strangest attraction in Romania.
Overview
After a week of citadels, fortified churches and painted monasteries, Cluj comes as a corrective. The city has the medieval bones you would expect — a large Gothic church standing alone in the middle of the main square, a surviving tailors' bastion, an old town of eighteenth and nineteenth-century facades — but that is not what it is about. Somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand students live here in term time, the technology sector is the largest in the country outside Bucharest, and the result is a city of full terraces, independent coffee, late bars, galleries in repurposed industrial buildings and one of the biggest music festivals in Europe filling the streets each summer. It is also visibly bilingual, with a long-established Hungarian community, its own Hungarian-language theatre and opera, and street signage and conversation in both languages. Then there is Turda. Thirty kilometres south, a salt mine worked from the medieval period until the 1930s has been reopened as something no one would predict: enormous chambers hundreds of metres underground, lit with vertical strips of light, containing a Ferris wheel, a mini-golf course, table tennis, an amphitheatre and, in a lower chamber, an underground lake with rowing boats. It is bizarre, genuinely beautiful and unlike anything else in Europe. Beyond it, the Turda gorge cuts a limestone cleft through the hills nearby, and west of the county the Apuseni mountains hold caves, karst plateaus and some of the emptiest walking country in Romania.
Discover 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.
Ways to Experience This Destination
A medieval salt mine reopened as an underground funfair — a Ferris wheel, amphitheatre and a boating lake a hundred metres down.
A free-standing Gothic church in the main square, full terraces from mid-afternoon, factory-district galleries and a huge summer festival.
Gorges, sinkholes, disappearing rivers and guided caves including permanent ice, in some of Romania's emptiest walking country.
An airport with a decent European spread, making an into-Bucharest, out-of-Cluj trip a way to avoid retracing the country.
Frequently asked questions
Treat this Visaja page as your starting point: verify the current rules directly with the official source before you submit an application.