Brașov, Romania: A Transylvania Travel Guide and Things to Do

Council Square, Piața Sfatului, is the natural place to begin. It is a long, sloping square lined with merchants’ houses in shades of ochre, pink and green, many with arcades and cellars that now hold restaurants. In the middle stands the Council House, for more than five hundred years the seat of the city’s administration and now home to the county history museum. Its tower once served as a lookout post.

The Black Church stands just off the square’s south-western corner, and it is bigger than its setting suggests. Work began in the 1380s and took almost a century. It was built as a Catholic parish church and passed to the Lutherans with the Reformation, and it still serves the city’s German-speaking Protestant community. Inside, the walls are hung with more than a hundred Anatolian carpets, most of them seventeenth and eighteenth-century pieces given by Saxon merchants who traded with the Ottoman Empire. The collection is often described as the richest of its kind outside Turkey. The organ, built by the Berlin maker Buchholz in 1839, has around 4,000 pipes, and concerts are held on it in the summer months.

Its name is a puzzle. The usual story says the great fire of 1689, which burned much of the town, blackened the walls. Recent studies have found little evidence of fire damage in the stone, and the name itself was not used until the late nineteenth century, so soot from later centuries may have done more than the flames.

From the church, Strada Sforii, Rope Street, leads towards the walls. It is about 80 metres long and between 111 and 135 centimetres wide, and it began as a corridor for firefighters. Most visitors walk it once for the photograph.

The walls themselves are best followed on the south-eastern side, along the foot of Tâmpa, where a shaded promenade runs between the old ramparts and the forest. Each bastion was once defended by a guild, and the Weavers’ Bastion, the best preserved of them, now holds a small museum of the town’s fortifications. It is the quietest part of the centre, and in the evening the lane fills with dog walkers and joggers rather than tour groups. At its far end runs Strada Cerbului and, beyond it, the line of the old fortifications, with the Weavers’ Bastion and the Black and White Towers on the slopes above, reached by steps through the trees for a view across the roofs.

Catherine’s Gate, built in 1559, is the only original medieval city gate that survives, a narrow stone tower with four small corner turrets. Right beside it, the Schei Gate was added in 1827 in a plain neoclassical style. It marks the way out to Șchei, the quarter where Romanian Orthodox families lived for centuries outside the Saxon walls. Its streets climb into a valley under the hills, past the Church of St Nicholas and the First Romanian School, a museum that holds early Romanian printed books and the press on which some of them were made.

The Junii, the young men of Șchei, still ride through the city in costume on the Sunday after Orthodox Easter, a custom documented since the early eighteenth century, before heading up to the Solomon’s Rocks for an afternoon of music and dancing. Easter customs elsewhere in Europe are more solemn, as the processions of Semana Santa in Spain show.

Tâmpa rises straight from the edge of the Old Town to about 960 metres above sea level, almost 400 metres above the square. Most of the mountain is a nature reserve covering about one and a half square kilometres, home to rare plants, a large share of Romania’s butterfly species and, in the deeper forest, brown bears, lynx and wolves.

The cable car leaves from a station at the foot of the hill and reaches the crest in under three minutes. It was built in 1968 and 1969, together with the restaurant at the top. The alternative is to walk. The most popular path zigzags up the slope through 25 hairpin bends, cut in 1837, and takes most walkers around an hour; steeper routes follow the old Knights’ Road and a flight of stone steps. From the top, a short path leads to the viewing platform beside the city’s name sign, with Council Square and the Black Church directly below.

On the summit plateau, scattered stones mark the site of Brasovia, a fortress probably built under the Teutonic Knights. It was never taken by force. In 1421 it fell into Ottoman hands, and once the townspeople had recovered it they pulled it down and used the stone to strengthen the defences in the valley.

The bears deserve a practical word. Brown bears from the surrounding forest occasionally come down to the edges of the residential areas below the hill, especially when food is short. Walk in daylight, stay on marked paths, keep food sealed and never feed them.

Brașov sits at the south-eastern corner of the Saxon lands, and the most rewarding day trips run west and north into the rolling hills where the fortified villages stand.

Sighișoara, about two hours away by road, is a small hilltop citadel that is still lived in, with a fourteenth-century Clock Tower, a covered wooden stairway up to the church on the hill and lanes of brightly painted houses. Its historic centre has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999. It is also the traditional birthplace of Vlad III, and the house where he is said to have been born stands near the Clock Tower.

Sibiu is further, about 145 kilometres west, and deserves a night. Its upper town spreads across two large squares, with attic windows in the roofs that look like half-closed eyes and the Brukenthal Museum, one of the oldest museums in Romania. The city was a European Capital of Culture in 2007.

Viscri, roughly 80 kilometres north-west, is the opposite of a city: a single long village street of Saxon farmhouses painted blue, green and yellow, with geese on the verges and a white fortified church on the rise at the end. It is one of the UNESCO fortified-church villages, and King Charles III has owned a restored house there for many years. Like most Saxon villages, Viscri lost the bulk of its German-speaking population when families emigrated to Germany in the years after 1989, and many of the houses stood empty for a time. Local families and heritage foundations have since restored a good number of them, some as guesthouses, using lime plaster, old roof tiles and the traditional colours, and a stay of a night gives the chance to see the cows walk themselves home along the street at dusk. The last stretch of road is slow, and the village is best seen in the early morning or evening light.

Brașov, Romania, also works as a stop on a longer European road trip, and many travellers continue west from Sibiu towards the Apuseni mountains or north to Maramureș. Its distant cousin on the Baltic, the old port town of Klaipėda in Lithuania, also grew from a castle of a German crusading order, founded as Memel in 1252.

Brașov, Romania, has four distinct seasons, and the right one depends on what the trip is for.

Late spring, from May into June, is the most rewarding time for walking: the beech forests on Tâmpa are fresh green, the meadows around the Saxon villages flower and the days are long. September is similar, with settled weather, harvest in the villages and fewer visitors than in summer. July and August are warm and lively, with events in Council Square and full hotels, and the castle at Bran is at its most crowded.

Winter is cold, often snowy, and has its own appeal. A Christmas market has filled Council Square in recent Decembers, and Poiana Brașov usually runs as a ski resort from around December until March. Days are short, though, and some village roads become difficult. Easter falls on a different date in the Orthodox calendar from the Western one in most years, and the week after it, with the Junii parade, is a busy but memorable time to be in the city.

The Bucharest connection is the main one:

• By train: direct trains from Bucharest’s Gara de Nord take roughly two and a half to three hours, with several departures through the day. The line climbs through the Prahova Valley past Sinaia, which makes the last hour a scenic one. Bucharest’s Henri Coandă Airport at Otopeni has a rail link to Gara de Nord.
• By air to Brașov: Brașov-Ghimbav International Airport, about 15 kilometres from the Old Town, received its first commercial flight on 15 June 2023. Its route list is shorter than Bucharest’s, so check what is flying in a given season.
• By road: the drive from Bucharest is about 180 kilometres through Ploiești and the Prahova Valley. Peleș Castle at Sinaia, built for King Carol I in the late nineteenth century, makes a natural stop on the way.

Brașov station is in the newer part of the city, a few kilometres from the walls, with buses and taxis waiting outside. For travellers coming from the west, Sibiu also has an airport, and trains link Sibiu and Sighișoara with Brașov, though the service on these lines is slower than the drive.

The Old Town is the obvious choice for a first visit. Guesthouses and small hotels occupy old merchants’ houses along the streets off Council Square and Strada Republicii, the main pedestrian street, and everything in the centre is a few minutes’ walk away. Rooms facing the square can be noisy on summer nights.

Șchei, uphill beyond the Schei Gate, is quieter and more residential, with a handful of guesthouses in old houses and easy access to the paths up the hills. Its streets are steep, which matters with luggage. The newer city between the Old Town and the station has larger hotels and apartments at lower prices, a short bus or taxi ride from the centre. For skiing or summer hiking, Poiana Brașov has its own resort hotels and chalets, though evenings there are quiet.

Anyone planning a lot of day trips should think about parking before booking, since the Old Town has limited space and some lanes are closed to traffic.

With only two days, the plan is simple: the Old Town, the walls and Tâmpa on the first, Bran and Râșnov on the second, back in time for dinner in Council Square. It is a satisfying weekend, and the one that most visitors arriving by train from Bucharest choose.

Three days are enough to see the city properly. A first day for Council Square, the Black Church, Rope Street, the walls and Șchei; a second morning on Tâmpa and an afternoon at Bran and Râșnov; a third day at Prejmer and Poiana Brașov, or at the Saxon villages. With one or two more nights, the things to do in Brașov expand into Transylvania itself: Sighișoara and Viscri on one long day, Sibiu as an overnight stop on the way west.

Travellers who enjoy hill walking will find more than enough for a week. The Piatra Craiului and Bucegi ranges are within an hour, and long marked trails cross them; those used to the hut-to-hut routes of the GR20 in Corsica will find the Carpathians gentler in gradient and much emptier. For a contrasting week on the coast, the Dalmatian coast of Croatia is a short flight away, and the kremlins and onion domes further east appear in the photo essay on Russian architecture from Moscow to the Volga.

Food is part of any Brașov travel guide worth following, because the cooking of the Saxon towns and Romanian villages meets on the same menus. The cellars around Council Square serve sarmale with polenta and sour cream, mici from the grill and ciorbă in bread bowls, and nearly every menu ends with papanași, fried doughnuts with sour cream and jam, large enough to share.

One practical detail for the last evening: the lit-up view over the roofs does not require the summit. The White Tower, reached by steps from the walls above Strada Cerbului, looks straight across the Old Town to the Black Church and the sign on Tâmpa, and it is a short climb from Council Square. More route-by-route planning for European cities and mountains is collected in the travel guides section.