Escorted Tours to Romania and Transylvania
Romania rewards anyone who likes looking properly at buildings. Bucharest has French-influenced boulevards and Belle Époque villas standing a few streets from the vast concrete of the Ceaúșescu years. Two hours north, the road climbs through the Prahova Valley into Transylvania, where Saxon settlers walled their towns and built citadels on the hilltops from the twelfth century onwards.
Our holiday here gives you five nights in Bucharest and two in Brasov, both in four-star hotels, with a professional English-speaking guide, flights and transfers arranged, and the castles at Sinaia and Bran included rather than sold to you as extras.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Romania Tours
Not in any direct sense. Bram Stoker never visited Romania and based his descriptions on books; Bran simply matched them well enough to inherit the reputation. The historical Vlad III, called Tepes, had connections with the Bran pass but no meaningful residence there. It is still worth seeing on its own terms as a fourteenth-century border fortress, and the castle makes no great pretence otherwise.
A fair amount, and much of it on uneven ground. Bucharest's architectural walking tour is flat but long. Brasov's old town is cobbled, Peles Castle is visited on foot through a sequence of rooms and stairs, Bran has narrow spiral stairways, and Rasnov Citadel sits above its village. If you are unsure whether the pace suits you, ask us and we will talk you through the day-by-day demands of your departure.
Our Bucharest and Brasov holiday includes seven breakfasts and seven evening meals, which leaves lunches free to suit yourself. Romanian cooking is hearty and central European in character: sour soups called ciorba, sarmale (cabbage rolls with pork and rice), grilled mititei sausages and polenta-style mamaliga, with good local wine from Dealu Mare and Murfatlar. Tell us about any dietary requirements when you book and we will pass them on to the hotels.
Romania is in the European Union but not the eurozone, so the currency is the Romanian leu; cards are widely accepted in Bucharest and Brasov, though small cash amounts are handy for markets and tips. British passport holders do not currently need a visa for short leisure visits, but entry rules and passport validity requirements do change, so check the Foreign Office advice before you travel and ask us if anything is unclear.
Bucharest's boulevards and Belle Époque villas
Between the 1880s and the 1930s Bucharest was rebuilt by architects who had trained in Paris, which is where the old nickname came from. Calea Victoriei still runs past the results: the Romanian Athenaeum concert hall of 1888, the Cantacuzino Palace, the former royal palace, and rows of merchants' villas with wrought-iron balconies, some immaculate, some visibly waiting for money.
Then there is the other Bucharest. In the 1980s a whole district of churches and nineteenth-century streets was flattened to make way for the Palace of the Parliament and the ceremonial avenue leading to it, on a scale that has to be seen from the ground to register at all.
The older layer survives in patches: the Lipscani lanes of the merchant quarter, and the small Stavropoleos church with its carved stone porch, one of the finest pieces of eighteenth-century Romanian work left in the city.
The castles at Sinaia and Bran
Peles Castle at Sinaia was built between 1873 and 1914 as a summer residence for Carol I, Romania's first king. It looks like a German hunting palace dropped into a Carpathian forest, which is more or less what it is: timbered gables outside, and inside a run of rooms in Moorish, Turkish and Florentine taste, with early electric light and central heating fitted from the start.
Bran Castle is a different sort of building altogether – a genuine fourteenth-century fortress on a rock guarding the pass between Transylvania and Wallachia, with narrow stairs and small rooms. Rasnov Citadel, nearby, was a refuge fortress where local Saxon villagers sheltered from Ottoman and Tatar raids, and the walk up to it is repaid by the view across to the Bucegi mountains.
Brasov and Saxon Transylvania
Brasov was founded by German settlers invited east in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the plan of the old town is still theirs: a long market square, the Council House in the middle of it, and the Black Church at one corner – a Gothic hall church, blackened by the fire of 1689, holding a large collection of Anatolian rugs given by merchants who traded south over the mountains.
Behind the town rises Mount Tampa, wooded to the summit; in front, the streets narrow towards the old defensive gates and the famously thin Rope Street.
The wider region carries the same story in miniature across dozens of villages: fortified churches with walls and towers built by farmers, several of them now under UNESCO protection, and hay meadows that are among the richest in wildflowers anywhere in Europe.
