Vacation ideas Transylvania

Transylvania is where the city and the mountain stand close to each other. You start from a square with colorful houses and, an hour's drive later, you're on a ridge where you can see half the country. Sibiu keeps an old center where the roofs have dormer windows, and the Liars' Bridge draws crowds at any hour. Cluj is busier and younger, with terraces full of people and roads leading to Turda Gorge and Turda Salt Mine, where the salt galleries have turned into an underground world with a lake and a boat. In Mureș County, Sighișoara remains one of Europe's few inhabited medieval citadels — you sleep between walls, not beside them. In Hunedoara, Corvin Castle rises on a cliff just the way you imagined it, and higher up, in the Orăștie Mountains, the Dacian fortresses at Sarmizegetusa Regia and Costești stand in the forest, quiet, at the end of stone paths worn two thousand years ago. Retezat adds another scale to it all: glacial lakes, black goats, and whole days of hiking without meeting a soul. Between them, Saxon villages with fortified churches — Biertan, Valea Viilor, Saschiz — show how people lived here for centuries, with a wall next to the house and the garden beyond it.