Fagaras Mountains

The Balea tunnel, cutting between Romania's highest mountains - Mount Negoiu (2535m/8314ft) and Mount Moldoveanu (2543m/8341ft) - is 845m (2771ft) long. The Fagaras Mountains offer the most spectacular hiking in the country, with well marked trails and an abundance of wildlife. The main drawback is the difficulty in getting there. The trailheads are 8km (5mi) to 15km (9mi) south of most train stations along the Brasov-Sibiu line, and the region is poorly serviced by bus. The main access point to the trails is Victoria, which you reach by getting off at the train halt 7km (4mi) north at Ucea. If you have a car, follow the Trans-Fagarasan Highway to Poienari Castle, just over the border in Wallachia. This was built for Vlad Tepes, and is regarded by Dracula buffs as the real McCoy. You climb 1480 steps to reach it from the side of a hydroelectric power plant below.

FAGARAS (Fogarasch), 54km west of Brasov, has a reputation as an ugly town, dominated by chemical works and scarred by Ceausescu's attempts at town planning, but it has its attractive aspects, and even some small-town charm in places. It also has a unusually wide range of small cheap hotels and makes a useful base for the mountains to the south and the Saxon villages just to the north. Between 1366 and 1460, the town and the surrounding duchy of Amlas were under Wallachian rule, but when Vlad the Impaler was dispossessed of his fiefdom, he set out on a murderous rampage from the Red Tower Pass, west of the Fagaras range, towards the Burzen Land, razing the citadel of Fagaras en route. The sturdy fortress now dominating the town centre was built on the ashes of this citadel, and owes its Renaissance features to the early seventeenth-century rulers Gábor Bethlen and György Rákóczi I.