Sibiu

Sibiu's centre is arranged around two connected squares on the upper terrace. The Large Square is the grand one — a wide expanse ringed by merchant houses, the Brukenthal Palace and the Council Tower, which you can climb for the view over the tiled roofs. Through an arch beside it, the Small Square is more intimate, curved and arcaded, and it holds the Bridge of Lies, a slender cast-iron footbridge from the 1850s and the first of its kind in the country, wrapped in a local story about its behaviour when someone untruthful crosses. Look up anywhere in either square and you will see the county's signature detail: the attic ventilation openings in the steep tiled roofs are formed as narrow lidded ovals that read unmistakably as eyes, and once noticed they cannot be unnoticed. The Brukenthal Museum on the Large Square is one of the oldest public art collections in Europe, opened to the public in the eighteenth century, and it is a serious gallery rather than a provincial one. Below the terrace, the lower town is a different city again — a network of steep cobbled lanes, arched passages and low pastel houses that the restoration reached less thoroughly and which is the better place to walk in the evening.

The countryside is the reason to give this county more than a night. Biertan, an hour east of the city, is the grander of the two UNESCO fortified churches here: a hilltop church inside three concentric rings of wall, reached by a covered wooden stairway from the village square, with a famous door whose lock throws more than a dozen bolts at once and a small chamber where the local Lutheran authorities once shut quarrelling couples together for two weeks with a single bed, plate and spoon before permitting a divorce — which the guides will tell you was remarkably effective. Valea Viilor, quieter and closer, is a compact and unusually complete example of the same idea. Both stand in villages where the Saxon population largely departed after 1990, and the sense of a community that has moved on while its architecture stayed is strong and slightly melancholy. Beyond the two listed sites, dozens of unlisted fortified churches dot the hills, most unlocked by whoever keeps the key in the village. A car is essential; the roads are narrow, sometimes unpaved, and the reward is the part of Transylvania that looks nothing like a restored square. The Brașov guide covers the two comparable villages in the neighbouring county, which are different sites rather than the same story told twice.

West of the city, a string of villages along the foot of the Cindrel mountains forms Mărginimea Sibiului, a region defined by sheep rather than by defence. This was and to a degree still is transhumance country — flocks moved seasonally between mountain pasture and lowland wintering grounds, in some cases over very long distances — and the villages retain their own dress, building style and dialect. Sibiel, Rășinari and Gura Râului are the usual stops, several with small museums of icons painted on glass, a folk-art form the region is known for. Guesthouses here serve their own cheese and brandy and it is among the better places in Romania to eat. On the city's southern edge, the ASTRA museum is one of the largest open-air ethnographic collections in Europe: several hundred buildings — houses, mills, workshops, churches, an entire working environment — moved here from across the country and arranged over a wooded park around a lake. It takes half a day at a minimum and it is far more absorbing than the format suggests, because the buildings are complete rather than sampled.

The county's southern boundary runs along the Făgăraș range, the highest in Romania, and the famous mountain road that crosses it starts its climb from this side. It is a spectacular drive to a glacial lake near the top and a genuinely good day out in summer — and it is closed by snow for roughly half the year, which the transport guide explains is a planning constraint rather than a detail. Even when shut, the lower approaches are open and the range is walkable from several valley trailheads, with the country's highest peak accessible to fit hikers on a long day from a hut. On timing, two nights in the city and a full day in the villages is the honest minimum, and three nights lets you add Mărginimea or the mountains without hurrying. Heading north-west towards Cluj, Alba's seven-pointed star fortress sits almost exactly on the route and makes an easy half-day stop rather than a detour. Sibiu also makes the better base than Brașov for anyone whose interest is the Saxon countryside rather than the castles, because more of the fortified villages lie within an hour of it. Late spring and early autumn are best; the city's centre is at its most atmospheric in winter, when the squares hold a Christmas market and the eyes in the roofs look considerably more watchful under snow.