The Most Beautiful Places in Romania
19 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Romania are Romanian Athenaeum, Merry Cemetery and Peleș Castle. The list covers 19 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Romania's beauty comes from the arc of the Carpathians and the layers of people who settled inside it. Transylvanian Saxons ringed their village churches with walls against raids, Orthodox princes in Wallachia and Moldavia built monasteries in a style of their own, and salt laid down by an ancient sea lies deep under the hills. Mountain passes, Danube gorges and painted wooden villages sit within a day of each other.
Peleș Castle at Sinaia, built for King Carol I in the late nineteenth century, packs Neo-Renaissance turrets and carved interiors into a Carpathian valley, while Corvin Castle at Hunedoara, the Gothic seat of the Hunyadi family, stands on a rock above a stream with its drawbridge on tall piers. Prejmer is the largest fortified church in southeastern Europe, its inner ring wall lined with storage rooms for every family in the village. In Bucharest, the domed Romanian Athenaeum has served as the city's concert hall since 1888.
Folk art and engineering share the list. The Merry Cemetery at Săpânța marks its graves with bright blue carved crosses painted with scenes and witty verses about the dead. Horezu Monastery gave its name to the Brâncovenesc style of Constantin Brâncoveanu's era, and Salina Turda turns an old salt mine into a vast underground hall. On the Danube, the rock face of Decebalus, the Dacian king defeated by Trajan, was carved only at the turn of the twenty-first century.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Romanian Athenaeum | Theatre building | |
| 2 | Merry Cemetery | Cemetery | |
| 3 | Peleș Castle | Palace | |
| 4 | Clock Tower of Sighișoara | Clock tower | |
| 5 | Prejmer fortified church | Fortified church | ✓ |
| 6 | Corvin Castle | Castle | |
| 7 | Bran Castle | Castle | |
| 8 | Rock Sculpture of Decebalus | Sculpture | |
| 9 | Horezu monastery | Monastery | ✓ |
| 10 | Curtea de Argeș Monastery | Cathedral | |
| 11 | Transfăgărășan | Mountain pass | |
| 12 | Salina Turda | Salt mine | |
| 13 | Biertan fortified church | Fortified church | ✓ |
| 14 | Slănic Salt Mine | Salt mine | |
| 15 | Scărișoara Cave | Ice cave | |
| 16 | Sucevița Monastery | Monastery | ✓ |
| 17 | Voroneț Monastery | Monastery | ✓ |
| 18 | The Endless Column | Sculpture | |
| 19 | Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, Șurdești | Church building | ✓ |
01 Romanian Athenaeum
Ateneul Român
Romania · 0.7 km from Bucharest44.441° N 26.097° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the heart of Bucharest, on Calea Victoriei, a domed rotunda fronted by a classical portico serves as the city's most prestigious concert hall. The Romanian Athenaeum is a compact, ornate building, round in plan and crowned by a tall dome, and it has become one of the defining images of the Romanian capital.
Did you know? Five mosaic medallions on the facade portray Romanian rulers, among them Neagoe Basarab, Alexandru cel Bun, Vasile Lupu, Matei Basarab and Carol I.
02 Merry Cemetery
Romania · 35.8 km from Baia Mare47.971° N 23.696° E
Chainwit. · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Merry Cemetery is cheerful on purpose, not by accident of tone.
Did you know? His apprentice Dumitru Pop-Tincu continued the tradition from 1977 until his death in 2022.
03 Peleș Castle
Romania · 32.4 km from Brașov45.360° N 25.543° E
Vislupus · CC BY-SA 4.0 Peleș Castle rises out of the forest above Sinaia, in the Prahova valley of the southern Carpathians, like a Bavarian fairy-tale castle set down in Romania: steep roofs, painted half-timbering, pinnacles and a main tower 66 metres high against the mountains.
Did you know? The glass ceiling of the Hall of Honour could be slid open by an electric motor, letting guests look at the summer night sky.
04 Clock Tower of Sighișoara
Turnul cu Ceas din Sighișoara
Romania46.219° N 24.793° E
Image by falco from Pixabay The Clock Tower of Sighișoara guards the main gate of the upper citadel of Sighișoara, a small medieval fortified town in Transylvania preserved with rare completeness and listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. It is about 64 metres tall and visible from almost everywhere in town.
Did you know? Two parallel vaulted passages from the 13th century pierce the base, once closed by solid oak doors and iron grilles whose traces remain.
05 Prejmer fortified church
Biserica fortificată din Prejmer
Romania · 16.3 km from Sfântu Gheorghe45.722° N 25.773° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ozsvathcsilla from Pixabay Prejmer, a village on the plain northeast of Brașov, is home to one of the best preserved of the fortified churches that the Transylvanian Saxons built to survive five centuries of raids. Its story begins with the Teutonic Knights, whom King Andrew II of Hungary allowed to settle in the Burzenland around 1211.
Did you know? Each of the 272 refuge chambers in the wall had its own entrance, reached by wooden stairways and walkways stacked up to four levels high.
06 Corvin Castle
Castelul Corvinilor
Romania · 15.1 km from Deva45.749° N 22.888° E
Image by mary1826 from Pixabay Corvin Castle is the Transylvanian castle of the imagination made real: a steep-roofed Gothic fortress on a limestone crag, raised on a rock above the Zlaști stream. It is one of the largest medieval castles in Romania still standing, and a building that served both as a stronghold and a lordly residence.
Did you know? According to legend, a raven snatched a ring given by King Sigismund to the infant John Hunyadi, and the bird with the ring became the family's emblem.
07 Bran Castle
Castelul Bran
Romania · 23.8 km from Brașov45.515° N 25.367° E
Image by rafaelutza from Pixabay Bran Castle sits on a rock at the mouth of the Bran pass, the route that for centuries linked Transylvania with Wallachia over the Carpathians, and its whole history follows from that position.
Did you know? In 1530 an army sent by the Wallachian prince Moise tried to take the castle, but its garrison held out and forced the attackers to withdraw.
08 Rock Sculpture of Decebalus
Statuia lui Decebal
Romania · 29.7 km from Drobeta-Turnu Severin44.641° N 22.291° E
Image by mary1826 from Pixabay Where the Danube squeezes through the Iron Gates gorge between Romania and Serbia, a bearded face stares out of the cliffs above the water: Decebalus, the last king of Dacia, who fought Rome and lost to the emperor Trajan at the start of the second century.
Did you know? Drăgan, born in 1917, was in his late seventies when carving began; he had made his fortune founding the gas company ButanGas in Italy in 1948.
09 Horezu monastery
Mănăstirea Horezu
Romania · 30.3 km from Râmnicu Vâlcea45.169° N 24.007° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
seriykotik1970 from Moscow Russia · Public domain Horezu, in the foothills of the Căpățânii mountains in Wallachia, is the largest and most complete work of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, who ruled Wallachia from 1688 to 1714 and gave his name to a whole architectural style.
Did you know? The prince founded a library at Hurezi that holds about 4,000 volumes today; its 1791 catalogue listed 382 printed books and 46 manuscripts, 115 of them in Romanian.
10 Curtea de Argeș Monastery
Mănăstirea Curtea de Argeș
Romania · 23.6 km from Râmnicu Vâlcea45.157° N 24.675° E
Pudelek · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few churches in Eastern Europe are as intricately carved as the cathedral of Curtea de Argeș. Its walls are faced in pale grey limestone richly worked with carved ornament, and above them rise twisted, leaning towers set around a central dome, a silhouette unlike any other church in Romania.
Did you know? The first frescoes, by the painter Dobromir, were finished in 1526; surviving fragments are kept in the National Museum of Art in Bucharest.
11 Transfăgărășan
Romania45.590° N 24.628° E
Image by GhitaB27 from Pixabay The Transfăgărășan is a mountain road built as a gesture of power that turned out to be a work of landscape art. It climbs over the Făgăraș Mountains in the Southern Carpathians, passing between Moldoveanu, the highest summit in Romania, and Negoiu, and topping out at 2,042 metres beside the glacial Bâlea Lake.
Did you know? The Bâlea tunnel under the main ridge is just 4.4 metres high and 6 metres wide, and blasting it alone took about 20 tonnes of explosives.
12 Salina Turda
Romania · 26.6 km from Cluj-Napoca46.588° N 23.787° E
Rkoster · CC BY 4.0 Salina Turda is a salt mine turned inside out into a cathedral of empty space.
Did you know? The Rudolf mine was named after Crown Prince Rudolf, renamed Saint Nicholas after 1918, and given back its original name in 1992.
13 Biertan fortified church
Biserica fortificată din Biertan
Romania46.135° N 24.521° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Otto Schemmel · Public domain Biertan is the most imposing of the fortified churches built by the Transylvanian Saxons, the German-speaking settlers who from the Middle Ages lived in villages between Sibiu, Mediaș and Sighișoara.
Did you know? The altarpiece painter was probably trained in Vienna and Nuremberg; at its centre Mary Magdalene embraces the foot of the cross.
14 Slănic Salt Mine
Salina Slănic
Romania · 32.9 km from Ploiești45.236° N 25.942° E
JanMeese · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Slănic salt mine, in the hill town of Slănic in Romania's Prahova County, about 100 km north of Bucharest, is less a tunnel than a buried cathedral.
Did you know? The Mihai mine's six chambers cover about 12,500 square metres, roughly a sixth of the floor area later opened at Unirea.
15 Scărișoara Cave
Peștera Scărișoara
Romania46.490° N 22.810° E
Țetcu Mircea Rareș · CC BY-SA 4.0 Scărișoara Cave, known locally as the Ghețar, "the glacier", holds the largest underground ice mass in Romania. It lies at about 1,150 metres in the Apuseni Mountains, at the edge of a forested karst plateau above the Arieș valley.
Did you know? Because the cave sits where Atlantic and Mediterranean weather systems meet, its ice records shifts between the two, filling a rare gap in winter climate data for Europe.
16 Sucevița Monastery
Mănăstirea Sucevița
Romania47.778° N 25.711° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Alexander Klink · CC BY 4.0 Sucevița is the last and most complete of the painted monasteries of Bucovina, the churches of northern Moldavia whose outer walls were covered in frescoes so that the Bible could be read in the open air.
Did you know? The church is dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ, so its patronal feast is celebrated at Easter.
17 Voroneț Monastery
Mănăstirea Voroneț
Romania · 32.6 km from Suceava47.517° N 25.864° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Dstefanescu · Public domain Voroneț is the most celebrated of the painted churches of Bukovina, the village monasteries of northeastern Romania whose outer walls are covered from ground to eaves with frescoes.
Did you know? In the judgment scene, Saint Paul leads the righteous towards paradise on the north side, while unbelievers face Moses on the south.
18 The Endless Column
Coloana Infinitului
Romania · 1.2 km from Târgu Jiu45.037° N 23.285° E
Cristian-Mihail Miehs -- Miehs ( discuție ) 13 ianuarie 2014 15:21 (EET) · Public domain At the eastern end of a long axis running through Târgu Jiu, the Endless Column rises almost 30 metres from the grass: a stack of identical rhomboid modules that seems as if it could go on for ever.
Did you know? Hidden inside is a square steel box girder 42 cm wide, assembled from three sections and anchored in a concrete foundation 5 metres deep.
19 Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, Șurdești
Biserica de lemn din Șurdești
Romania · 15.6 km from Baia Mare47.597° N 23.764° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pivari.com · CC BY-SA 4.0 The wooden churches of Maramureș are known for their tall, needle-like towers, and Șurdești has the tallest of the group on the UNESCO list. Its tower, flanked by four small corner turrets, is usually given as 54 metres high, which makes this one of the tallest wooden churches of its period anywhere.
Did you know? The tall tower rises directly from the pronaos, the first room of the church, and is braced against the wind along its entire height.
More about Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, Șurdești →
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Romania?
- On our list, Romanian Athenaeum ranks first, followed by Merry Cemetery and Peleș Castle.
- What is the Merry Cemetery in Romania?
- It is the village cemetery of Săpânța in Maramureș, where graves are marked with carved oak crosses painted blue and decorated with scenes and humorous verses about the lives of the dead. The tradition was begun by the local carver Stan Ioan Pătraș in the 1930s.
- What is a fortified church in Transylvania?
- It is a village church enclosed by defensive walls, towers and storage rooms, built by the Transylvanian Saxons from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries so the whole community could shelter during raids. Prejmer and Biertan are the best-known examples, and a group of these villages is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Is Bran Castle really Dracula's castle?
- Bran is popularly linked with Dracula, but Bram Stoker never visited Romania and there is no firm evidence that Vlad the Impaler lived there. Its reputation rests on its dramatic setting at a Carpathian pass rather than on the novel.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Romania?
- In our collection, the places in Romania are most often churches (3), monasteries (3), fortified churches (2) and castles (2).
- How many places are on this list in Romania?
- The list covers 19 places.