Transfăgărășan

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. From the air or from the slopes above, its northern ramp is unforgettable: a grey ribbon folded into tight hairpins and long traverses across a bare green amphitheatre of rock and grass, laid on the mountainside like a sketch of a road rather than a road itself.

It was built between 1970 and 1974 on the orders of Nicolae Ceaușescu, who wanted a route across the range that troops could use in case of a Soviet invasion like the one that had crushed Czechoslovakia in 1968. Most of the work was done by army units at high altitude, blasting the way with some six million kilograms of dynamite; the official toll was forty soldiers killed, and unofficial estimates run far higher. The road opened in September 1974, though paving went on until 1980. Ceaușescu's critics called it his folly, and for decades it was little more than a curiosity; it found a new life when a British television programme in 2009 declared it the best road in the world, and drivers, motorcyclists and cyclists have come for the curves ever since.

The southern side is a different journey, longer and wooded, climbing past Vidraru, a 166-metre arch dam completed in 1965 with its long reservoir winding between forested slopes, and near the ruins of Poenari Castle, the cliff-top fortress associated with Vlad the Impaler. Near the summit the road plunges into the Bâlea Tunnel, about 884 metres long and the longest road tunnel in Romania, and comes out above the lake, where the cirque walls rise straight from the water and the Bâlea Waterfall drops down the valley below. Snow lies here for much of the year, and the high section is a summer road only.

Getting there

The road, numbered DN7C, runs for about 150 km from near Pitești in the south to the main road between Brașov and Sibiu in the north. The nearest town on the northern side is Făgăraș, about 40 km from the pass; the nearest airport is Sibiu International (SBZ), about 48 km away by air but further by road. A car or motorcycle is the natural way to travel the route; a cable car also climbs from Bâlea Cascadă on the northern ramp to Bâlea Lake.