The mist in the Carpathians at 7am is not the gentle mist of an English autumn. It is thick and cold and slightly threatening, boiling up from the forest floor and wrapping around the spires of the foothill villages like something from a story the Brothers Grimm forgot to write down. The Carpathians, 1,500 km of mountains arcing through central and eastern Europe, the largest undisturbed forest in Europe outside Scandinavia, contain roughly 6,000 brown bears, 4,000 wolves, and 2,000 lynx. Romania is home to the largest population of large carnivores in Europe outside Russia. The landscape is wild in a way that western Europe has long since forgotten, and the sense of entering a place where the natural world has not been entirely subdued is exhilarating.

Romania: Europe You Did Not Know Still Existed

Transylvania (and the truth about Dracula): The Bran Castle, marketed as “Dracula’s Castle,” visited by 800,000 tourists annually, has almost nothing to do with Vlad Țepeș (Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century Wallachian prince who inspired the Dracula myth). Vlad may have passed through Bran as a prisoner; he certainly never lived there. The castle is a 14th-century border fortress, currently housing the art collection of Queen Marie of Romania, and the view from the battlements, the forested hills rolling away to the Carpathian peaks, is the real attraction. The marketing is a fiction, but the castle is beautiful, and the surrounding region (the villages of Măgura and Peștera, accessible only by unpaved road, the guesthouses serving home-cooked meals from ingredients grown in the garden) is the Transylvania of the imagination: haystacks in the fields, horse-drawn carts on the roads, a way of life that has not changed much in a century.

Sighișoara: The birthplace of Vlad Țepeș (born 1431, the house is now a restaurant, the Vlad Dracul House, the food is mediocre, the historical significance is not), a perfectly preserved medieval citadel on a hilltop, the nine surviving towers of the original fourteen fortifications still standing, the cobbled streets winding between pastel-coloured merchants’ houses. The Clock Tower (built 14th century, the clock mechanism from 1648 still working, the wooden figurines, the drummer, the executioner, the goddess of justice, rotating on the hour) is the centrepiece. The covered staircase (the Scholars’ Stairs, 175 steps, built 1642 to protect schoolchildren from the weather on their way to the school at the top of the hill) connects the lower town to the Church on the Hill. The cemetery beside the church, Germanic, orderly, the gravestones tilting at gentle angles, is peaceful and melancholic and very Saxon. The Saxons (German-speaking settlers invited by the Hungarian kings in the 12th century to defend the Carpathian passes) built Sighișoara; they are mostly gone now (emigrated to Germany after 1989), and the town, still inhabited, still lived in, but haunted by the absence of the people who built it, is beautiful and complicated.

The Maramureș (Wooden Churches and Haystacks): The Maramureș region, the northern Carpathians, bordering Ukraine, is the rural Europe of the 19th century, preserved by poverty and isolation. The wooden churches (eight of them UNESCO-listed, built from oak without metal nails, the spires climbing to improbable heights, 78 metres at the church in Șurdești, the tallest wooden church in Europe) are the architectural treasures. The Merry Cemetery in Săpânța is the folk-art highlight: wooden crosses painted in bright blue (the traditional colour of hope and freedom), each carved with an epitaph, often humorous, occasionally brutally honest, and a naive painting depicting the deceased’s life or, more commonly, the manner of their death. “Underneath this heavy cross / Lies my poor mother-in-law / If she had lived another day / She would have been the end of me” is one of the gentler examples. The cemetery is still active; the artist who carved the crosses (Stan Ioan Pătraș, died 1977) is buried here, his own cross carved by his apprentice.

The Danube Delta (A Different Romania): The Danube, Europe’s second-longest river, empties into the Black Sea through a delta of 5,800 square kilometres, the largest wetland in Europe, a UNESCO World heritage site and a Biosphere Reserve. The delta is home to 300 species of birds (pelicans, the largest colony in Europe, over 3,500 pairs, herons, egrets, pygmy cormorants, the white-tailed eagle) and the Letea Forest, a strange, haunting landscape of oak trees growing on sand dunes, the branches draped in lianas, wild horses roaming between the trees. The village of Sfântu Gheorghe, at the mouth of the Danube, where the river meets the Black Sea, is the base for exploration. The boat trips through the channels (€30-50 for a half-day, the guides know where the pelicans nest) are the essential delta experience. The silence, the engine cut, the boat drifting, the only sounds the splash of a fish and the distant cry of a bird, is the delta at its most profound. The Black Sea beach at Sfântu Gheorghe is wild, empty, and undeveloped; the contrast with the Mediterranean resorts is absolute and deliberate.