5 Days in Brașov

Start in Piața Sfatului, Council Square, where Kronstadt's merchants traded for centuries. The building in the middle is the Council House (Casa Sfatului), where the town council met from the 15th century, and the tower on top is the Trumpeter's Tower, from which a lookout watched for fires and approaching armies. Today it's the County History Museum, small but a good first lesson in who built this town and why it needed so many walls. On the corner of the square, the Museum of Urban Civilization shows how the town's merchant families lived, room by room, from the 17th to the 20th century.

Walk around the square before you go anywhere else. The tall merchant houses on its sides are a mix of Gothic, Renaissance and baroque. South of the Council House is the Hirscher House, built in the 1540s by Apollonia Hirscher, widow of a town judge, who ran his trade with Vienna and the Ottoman lands and became the richest woman in town. On the west side, Casa Mureșenilor was the home of the Mureșianu family of journalists; their cousin Andrei Mureșanu wrote the 1848 poem that became Romania's national anthem in 1990.

Behind the square stands the Black Church, a church far too big for a town this size, which says everything about how rich Saxon Kronstadt was. It was built from the 1380s to the late 15th century as the Catholic church of St. Mary and became Lutheran in the Reformation. Everyone will tell you it got its name from the Great Fire of 1689, which blackened its walls, but historians have found no sign of the name before the late 19th century, and the dark stone owes more to a century of soot and smoke. It's usually described as the largest Gothic church between Vienna and Istanbul.

Inside, the walls are hung with more than a hundred carpets from the 15th to 18th centuries, woven in Anatolia and given to the church by the town's merchants. You'll see them labeled "Transylvanian rugs", and it's one of the largest collections of Ottoman carpets outside Turkey. The organ, built by Carl August Buchholz in 1839 with almost 4,000 pipes, is the largest mechanical organ in Romania, and the statue outside is Johannes Honterus, the humanist who brought the Reformation and a printing press to the town in the 16th century.

Romanians eat soup at lunch, every day, and it's the best introduction to the food here. Order a ciorbă, a soup soured with borș (fermented wheat bran) or lemon. The Transylvanian kind, ciorbă ardelenească, gets its flavor from tarragon, and ciorbă de burtă, tripe soup with garlic and sour cream, is the one locals swear by after a long night. Ask for a hot pepper on the side and bite it between spoonfuls.

La Ceaun, on Council Square, is the place for it: its soups are cooked in cauldrons, and the bean soup comes in a hollowed-out loaf of bread. For a longer traditional menu, Sergiana, in a vaulted cellar on Strada Mureșenilor, is where locals send visitors.

Strada Sforii, Rope Street, is a lane little more than a meter wide that runs between two parallel streets near the southern wall. It was first mentioned in 1674 and is usually said to have been made as an access path for firefighters, and it's often listed among the narrowest streets in Europe, though not, as the signs suggest, the narrowest. It's also the most photographed place in town, so go in the early afternoon lull rather than at sunset.

A few minutes away are two gates that tell the town's story. Catherine's Gate, built by the tailors' guild in 1559, is the only one of the original medieval city gates still standing; its four corner turrets announced that the town had the right to pass death sentences. For centuries it was also the gate the Romanians of Șchei had to come through. Next to it, the neoclassical Schei Gate replaced it in 1827-28. You'll go through it tomorrow.

Brașov's walls once ran for about three kilometers, with bastions paid for and defended by the town's guilds. Walk Aleea După Ziduri, the path "behind the walls" along the western side, under Warthe hill. Halfway along, the Graft Bastion bridges the little Graft stream, and steps lead from it up to the White Tower and, a little further, the Black Tower. The Black Tower got its name from a fire after it was struck by lightning in 1559, the White Tower, horseshoe-shaped and about 20 m tall, from its whitewashed walls.

Both were restored and hold small exhibitions, with opening hours that come and go, but the views are what you're here for, and they're the best free ones in town: the red roofs, the bulk of the Black Church and Tâmpa rising behind the old town. Get there an hour before sunset, when the light turns everything orange.

Strada Republicii, the pedestrian street that runs north from Council Square, is where the town comes out in the evening. It's busy, a bit commercial and pleasant all the same, with terraces all the way up.

For a drink, skip the generic bars and try the local craft beer scene. Berăria Mustață, by the Black Church, brews its own, and Czell Brauhaus on Council Square serves a revived version of Czell, the beer of the family brewery that made Brașov's beer from 1893. If you'd rather start with something stronger, ask for a glass of pălincă, the double-distilled fruit brandy of Transylvania.

Go out through the Schei Gate and the town changes. Șchei was where Romanians, and Bulgarians before them, lived outside the Saxon walls. For centuries they couldn't own houses inside the walls, could enter only at set hours and paid a toll at the gate, so they built their own world here: churches, schools, merchant houses and a stubborn sense of being the original Brașov.

Its heart is St. Nicholas Church, an Orthodox church with Gothic spires, a strange and lovely mix of styles. A wooden church stood here by 1399, and the stone one was built from 1495 with help from the princes of Wallachia. The painted porch and the cemetery around it, where the diplomat Nicolae Titulescu and many of the families that shaped Romanian culture are buried, are worth a slow walk.

In the churchyard is the First Romanian School, a museum in the building where children were taught in Romanian from 1583. Brașov is also where Deacon Coresi printed some of the first books in the Romanian language, in the 1560s and 70s, and the museum shows his books and an old press.

Visits are guided, take about 40 minutes, and the guides clearly love the place. It's small, but it explains why Șchei matters so much to Romanians, and why every spring, on the Sunday after Orthodox Easter, the Junii, young men in old costumes on horseback, gather here and ride through the old town and out to Solomon's Rocks, a limestone gorge at the edge of the city where the celebrations go on into the afternoon.

Walk back through the Schei Gate and along the southern walls to the Weavers' Bastion, built in the 1420s and 30s and one of the best preserved of them all. Each guild had to build, man and pay for its own stretch of wall, and this one, with its oak galleries on three and four levels, shows you how seriously they took it.

Inside is a big model of Brașov as it looked in the 17th century, made in 1896 from an old engraving, with every street, tower and the Black Church in miniature. After a day and a half of walking, it's fun to find your own route on it.

Before the climb, have mici, Romania's national barbecue food: little skinless rolls of minced beef, lamb and pork with garlic and spices, grilled and eaten with mustard, bread and a cold beer. Every traditional restaurant in town has them on the menu, and they're cheap and filling, so you'll still have room for dinner. Take your time: the walk under the walls, along Aleea de sub Tâmpa, is the town's favorite evening stroll, and it leads straight to the start of the path up.

Tâmpa is the wooded mountain that rises straight from the old town, 960 m high, with the big white BRAȘOV letters near the top. A medieval citadel, Brassovia, stood on its summit until the townspeople pulled it down in the 15th century, and a few stones are still there under the trees.

This is also where Brașov's real Dracula story belongs. In 1459-60 Vlad the Impaler, prince of Wallachia, fell out with the town's Saxon merchants, who had backed a rival for his throne. He raided Brașov's suburbs and impaled his captives, and German pamphlets printed soon afterwards made him famous across Europe as a monster, with a woodcut of him dining among the impaled. Local tradition puts the killings on the slopes of Tâmpa and around St. Bartholomew's, a 13th-century church north of the center and the oldest building in Brașov. Later still, in the 1950s, foresters planted trees on Tâmpa's slope to spell STALIN, after whom the town was then named.

You can walk up in about an hour on the Serpentine path, cut in 1837 with 25 hairpin bends through beech forest from behind the walls, or take the cable car, rebuilt and reopened in October 2025. The view from the platform next to the letters is the one on every postcard: the whole old town, the Black Church and the flat land of the Bârsa basin rolling away to the mountains.

Stay up for dinner at the Panoramic restaurant at the top of the cable car, which reopened together with it in October 2025 after a full rebuild. The food is Romanian and international, from a Transylvanian sour soup to steaks, and the prices are what you'd expect for the view, but watching the lights of the town come on below you is worth paying for once. Book a window table on weekends, and check the time of the last cable car down.

Romania has the largest brown bear population in Europe outside Russia, and the Libearty Bear Sanctuary near Zărnești is where the unlucky ones end up. In 1998 Cristina Lapis saw three bears kept in a cage at a restaurant, and she visited one of them, Maya, every day until it died. In 2005 she opened the sanctuary in its memory, and today more than 130 bears rescued from cages, circuses and roadside zoos live in its 69 hectares of oak and hazel forest.

You see them on a guided walk along the fences, and the stories the guides tell about each bear are as much a part of the visit as the bears themselves. It's the ethical way to see a bear in Romania, and a better one than any "bear watching" tour that feeds wild bears to bring them in.

From the sanctuary, drive 10 minutes back towards Brașov to Râșnov Fortress, on a hill above the town of the same name, with its own Hollywood-style letters. It probably goes back to the Teutonic Knights in the early 13th century, but it was the villagers of Râșnov and its neighbors who kept and defended it as a refuge, and in times of attack whole families moved inside the walls with their animals. It fell only once, in 1612, when the besiegers found the path to the defenders' secret spring.

That's why the fortress later got its famous well, about 146 m deep and dug in the 1620s and 30s. Legend says two Turkish prisoners dug it for seventeen years in exchange for their freedom, which is a good story and almost certainly just that. Be warned that the fortress itself has been closed for restoration for several years, with reopening planned in phases from 2028. What you can visit is the garden and the entrance tower, so treat it as a short stop for the view over the walls to the Bucegi mountains, not a full visit. Below the hill, the Valea Cetății cave holds concerts in its main chamber.

Bran is shepherd country, and the market at the foot of the castle sells its specialty: brânză de burduf, salty sheep's cheese packed into a tube of fir bark, which gives it a resin smell you either love or don't. Taste before you buy.

For lunch, order bulz, a ball of mămăligă (cornmeal porridge) wrapped around cheese and baked until crusty, often with a fried egg and sour cream on top. Shepherds made it over the fire in the mountains, and the guesthouse restaurants of Bran still do it well.

Bran Castle is the most visited sight in Romania, and it's famous because of a story that isn't true. In 1377 the king of Hungary allowed the Saxons of Brașov to build a fortress here at their own cost, to guard the pass and collect customs on the road from Wallachia, and it was finished around 1388. Bram Stoker never came to Romania, and Vlad the Impaler, the prince who lent Dracula his name, has no proven connection to the castle; the story that he was held prisoner here is a myth too. His real link is with Brașov itself, as you heard on Tâmpa.

What it does have is a much better real story. In 1920 the town gave the castle to Queen Marie of Romania, the British-born granddaughter of Queen Victoria and one of the most popular royals of her day, and she made it a home. The rooms you walk through, narrow staircases, wooden furniture and white walls, are hers far more than any vampire's. The Dracula exhibits are there, but treat them as the gift shop they are.

Peleș Castle is what Bran is not: a real royal palace, and an extraordinary one. Carol I, a German prince who became Romania's first king, fell in love with this valley and built himself a summer residence here, mostly between 1873 and 1883, with craftsmen from all over Europe, and kept adding to it until 1914. It was one of the most modern houses of its time, with central heating and electricity from its own power plant.

Inside, every room is in a different style: a Florentine hall, a Moorish salon, a Turkish parlor, carved wood everywhere and an armory of about 4,000 pieces. Restraint was not the brief, and that's the fun of it.

A few minutes up the hill is Pelișor, "little Peleș", built for Carol's nephew and heir Ferdinand and his wife, Queen Marie, the same queen who made Bran her home. Marie decorated it herself in Art Nouveau, with gilded leaves, carved wood and a small golden room, and it feels far more like a house that people lived in.

Sinaia has been a mountain resort since the king made it fashionable, and the restaurants along the main road do mountain food: trout from the streams, ciorbă, polenta with cheese and sour cream, and grilled meat. It's a good place to try sarmale, cabbage leaves rolled around minced meat and rice and cooked for hours, served with mămăligă and a spoonful of sour cream.

The town takes its name from Sinaia Monastery, founded in 1695 by a Wallachian nobleman, Mihail Cantacuzino, after a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai. The small old church in the inner courtyard is the original, with painted walls inside and out, and the bigger church next to it was added in the 19th century. It's quiet, under the trees, and a nice contrast to the castle.

Take the train ten minutes back up the valley to Bușteni, where Prince Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino, one of the richest men in Romania and twice its prime minister, had the architect Grigore Cerchez build him a Neo-Romanian summer castle, finished in 1911. Its terrace looks straight across the valley at the cliffs of the Bucegi and the Caraiman Cross on top. In 2022 it became a filming location for Nevermore Academy in the Netflix series Wednesday, which has brought a whole new crowd up the hill.

It's open every day until 7pm (8pm from Friday to Sunday), which makes it the easy last stop of the day and the main sight when Peleș is closed. If you'd rather go up into the mountains, the cable car from Bușteni climbs to the Babele and Sphinx rock formations at about 2,200 m.

The Saxon villages around Brașov were raided again and again by Ottoman and Tatar armies, so they turned their churches into fortresses. Prejmer is one of the largest and best preserved of them, and part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Teutonic Knights began the church in 1218 and Cistercian monks finished it, and around it the villagers built a ring of walls about 12 m high and several meters thick.

The clever part is inside the walls: more than 270 small rooms on four levels, one for each family, where they kept grain and could live during a siege, reached by wooden stairs and galleries. Walking along them, you understand how a whole village could hold out for weeks.

On the way back, stop at Hărman, a few kilometers closer to Brașov, where the church sits inside rings of walls with seven towers and a bell tower 56 m tall. It's smaller and quieter than Prejmer, and a chapel in one of the towers has 15th-century wall paintings of the Last Judgment that are worth asking about. Seeing two of these churches back to back shows you how each village solved the same problem in its own way.

Back in town, walk along Bulevardul Eroilor and through Titulescu Park, where Brașov's newer, 19th and 20th century center begins. The county council building on the boulevard, then the Communist Party headquarters, is where one of the most important events of late communism in Romania happened. On 15 November 1987, workers from the Steagul Roșu truck factory, angry at wage cuts and empty shops, marched into town shouting against Ceaușescu and ransacked the Communist Party headquarters. By evening the army and the Securitate had cleared the streets, and about 300 people were arrested and later deported to other towns, but it showed that the regime could be challenged, two years before it fell.

Directly in front of the building, the Heroes' Cemetery remembers the people killed in Brașov in the revolution of December 1989. There's also a strange footnote: from 1950 to 1960 the town was officially called Orașul Stalin, Stalin City.

Brașov has a serious specialty coffee scene, with small roasters like Croitoria de Cafea and cafés like Nola. Take a break in one and pair it with a slice of cozonac, the sweet bread swirled with walnuts and cocoa that every Romanian family bakes for Christmas and Easter and the good bakeries sell all year. Or try kürtőskalács, the chimney cake rolled in sugar and cinnamon, which came from the Hungarian Székely towns to the east; the Saxons have their own version, Baumstriezel.

For the last night, book a table at one of the old town's traditional restaurants, many of them in vaulted medieval cellars, and start the Romanian way, with a small glass of țuică, the plum brandy, and a toast: noroc. Then order the full spread: a ciorbă, sarmale with mămăligă, or tochitură, a pork stew with polenta, cheese and a fried egg on top.

Leave room for papanași, the dessert Romanians will tell you not to skip: fried doughnuts made with fresh cheese, topped with sour cream and sour cherry or blueberry jam, with a small doughnut ball balanced on top. One portion is plenty for two. Finish with a glass of afinată, the sweet blueberry liqueur of the mountains.