Bucharest is a capital that baffles you and then hooks you. Once nicknamed 'Little Paris' for its grand boulevards, its Belle Époque buildings and its very own Arc de Triomphe, it is really a city of stark contrasts: art nouveau palaces next to communist blocks, Orthodox churches tucked between glass towers, and the world's second-largest administrative building —Ceaușescu's enormous Palace of the Parliament— dominating the skyline. It isn't a picture-perfect city, and that is exactly its charm: it is authentic, lively, contradictory and surprisingly fun.
Capital of Wallachia and later of all Romania, Bucharest has lived through fires, earthquakes, wars and one of Europe's harshest communist dictatorships, which flattened entire neighbourhoods to build its pharaonic Civic Centre. That wound left scars, but also a particular energy: an old town (Lipscani) turned into a district of bars and terraces with one of the best nightlifes on the continent, a booming food scene, gorgeous spots like Cărturești Carusel and genuine hospitality. All for a fraction of what the rest of Europe costs.
This guide covers the essentials of Bucharest with a practical, friendly eye: what to see without getting lost in its size, how to get around on its cheap and efficient metro, how to make sense of its turbulent history, where to stay and how to eat really well for little money, and how to use it as a base to discover Romania. Bucharest is the best starting point to fall in love with a country that still flies under the tourist radar: chaotic, cultured, green and full of life.
Bucharest began as a fortress on the banks of the Dâmbovița and is first documented in 1459, in a deed signed by Prince Vlad Țepeș (Vlad the Impaler), the same man who inspired the Dracula legend, who used it as one of his residences. It grew as the court of the princes of Wallachia and in 1659 became their capital, replacing Târgoviște. For centuries it was a crossroads between the Ottoman Empire, to which Wallachia paid tribute, the Habsburgs and Russia. In 1862, after the union of Wallachia and Moldavia, it became the capital of the new Romanian state, and under Kings Carol I and Ferdinand it enjoyed a golden, elegant, French-influenced era (late 19th and early 20th centuries) that earned it the nickname 'Little Paris'. The 20th century was brutal: two world wars, a devastating earthquake in 1977 and, above all, Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist dictatorship, which in the 1980s demolished a fifth of the historic centre to build his gigantic Palace of the Parliament and the Civic Centre. In December 1989, Bucharest was the epicentre of the revolution that overthrew and executed Ceaușescu, ending more than four decades of communism. Since then it has been the capital of a democratic Romania, a member of the European Union since 2007. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of the Romanian south: Bucharest, the capital born on Wallachian land and marked by the kingdom and by communism, and the Southern Carpathians with the royal castle of Peleș at Sinaia and the Prahova valley.
Read the history of Bucharest and Wallachia →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 10 activities in Bucarest. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Legend has it that Bucharest owes its name to a shepherd called Bucur, who is said to have founded a settlement on the banks of the river Dâmbovița and named the place after himself — hence București, 'the city of Bucur'. It is a lovely story but an unlikely one; historians think the name comes rather from the word 'bucurie' (joy) or from an old landowner. What is certain is that this fertile plain south of the Carpathians, criss-crossed by rivers and forests, had human settlements from very ancient times, in the historic region of Wallachia.
The first written mention of Bucharest has an exact date and a legendary protagonist: 20 September 1459, in a document signed by Vlad al III-lea, prince of Wallachia, better known as Vlad Țepeș ('the Impaler') or Vlad Dracula, the same historical figure who centuries later would inspire Bram Stoker's novel. Vlad turned the citadel of Bucharest into one of his residences and strongholds, and there the Curtea Veche (Old Court) went up, the princely palace whose ruins you can still visit in the middle of the historic centre, next to the oldest church in the city.
Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Bucharest grew as a strategic commercial and military stronghold, fought over for its position between the court of Târgoviște, then the capital of Wallachia, and the routes towards the Danube and the Ottoman Empire, to which the principality paid tribute to keep its autonomy.
In 1659, Bucharest officially became the capital of the principality of Wallachia, displacing the old seat of Târgoviște. The city grew around the court, the monasteries and the markets; its commercial district, Lipscani, took its name from Leipzig, the German city many goods came from, and filled with guilds of craftsmen and merchants from all over Europe and the East.
It was a turbulent time. Wallachia was an autonomous principality but a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, and Bucharest was caught for generations on the chessboard of the three great powers contesting the region: the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg monarchy and tsarist Russia. The city was occupied and sacked several times, and suffered plagues, fires and earthquakes. Through the eighteenth century it was ruled by the so-called Phanariot princes, appointed by the sultan from the Greek families of Constantinople, a period remembered for its crushing taxation.
Even so, Bucharest established itself as the largest urban centre in historic Romania, with its Orthodox churches in the brâncovenesc style — such as the exquisite Stavropoleos monastery (1724) — its merchants' inns (hanuri) such as the Hanul lui Manuc, and an intense social life that mixed the Balkan, the Ottoman and the European. Travellers of the time described it as an oriental city of dusty streets and gardens, very different from the one that would come later.
The nineteenth century transformed Bucharest completely. In 1859, the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia united under a single prince, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and in 1862 Bucharest was proclaimed capital of the United Principalities, the seed of modern Romania. In 1866 a German prince came to the throne, Carol I of the house of Hohenzollern, who in 1881 proclaimed himself king of the newly independent Kingdom of Romania, after the war that freed Wallachia from Ottoman vassalage.
Under Carol I and his successor Ferdinand, Bucharest lived its golden age. The Romanian elite, educated in France, wanted to turn their capital into a 'little Paris': broad boulevards were opened, palaces and Belle Époque buildings went up, and institutions flourished such as the Romanian Athenaeum (1888), the dazzling concert hall funded in part by a public collection, or the CEC Palace. An Arch of Triumph was even built in imitation of the Parisian one. The city filled with cafés, theatres, hat shops and motor cars; it was elegant, cosmopolitan and French in style, and its nickname travelled the world.
That belle époque was marked by the First World War: between 1916 and 1918, Bucharest was occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops, and the court took refuge in Iași. But Romania came out of the war enlarged: in 1918 a united Romania was formed ('România Mare', Greater Romania), which added Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bucovina, and Bucharest became the capital of a much larger country.
The twentieth century was extremely hard on Bucharest. During the Second World War, Romania first fought on the Axis side, under the regime of marshal Antonescu, and the city was bombed by Allied aircraft in 1944 because it was a centre for supplying oil to Germany. That same year, king Michael I staged a coup that pulled the country out of the alliance with Hitler and moved it to the Allied side. The Holocaust also left its mark: in January 1941, a violent Iron Guard pogrom against the Jewish community of Bucharest caused more than a hundred deaths, an episode the city remembers soberly.
After the war, the Soviet occupation imposed a communist regime. In 1947 the monarchy was abolished and king Michael was forced to abdicate and go into exile. Bucharest became the capital of the People's Republic, and later the Socialist Republic, of Romania. In March 1977, an earthquake of magnitude 7.2 shook the city and killed more than 1,500 people across the country, most of them in the capital, bringing down entire buildings.
The deepest blow, however, was political. The dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, in power since 1965, embarked in the 1980s on a delirious project of 'systematisation': he ordered the demolition of close to a fifth of Bucharest's historic centre — whole neighbourhoods, churches, monasteries and the homes of tens of thousands of families — to build a new Civic Centre and his pharaonic House of the People (today the Palace of the Parliament), the heaviest administrative building in the world. While the population went cold and hungry because of the exports used to pay off the foreign debt, Ceaușescu was raising his monument to megalomania.
In December 1989, Bucharest was the stage for the end of Romanian communism. On 21 December, Ceaușescu called a mass rally from the balcony of the Central Committee, in the centre of the city, to condemn the protests that had broken out in Timișoara. But the crowd, live on television, began to jeer him; the dictator froze and the rally turned into a revolt. The next day, after days of gunfire in University Square and other points of the city, Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled by helicopter from the roof of the building. They were captured, tried summarily and shot on Christmas Day. The Romanian Revolution, the bloodiest of those that brought down the Eastern bloc, left more than a thousand dead across the country, many of them in Bucharest, and a Revolution Square that keeps its memorial today.
The transition of the 1990s was difficult and turbulent, marked by economic crisis and by episodes such as the 'mineriads', in which miners brought to the capital put down demonstrators. But Bucharest gradually rebuilt itself. In 2004 Romania joined NATO and in 2007 the European Union, a before and after for the city.
Today Bucharest is a vibrant and contradictory European capital: restored Belle Époque palaces sit alongside the grey blocks of the communist era, the glass towers of business and a historic centre turned into one of the liveliest bar and terrace areas in Europe. It has a booming cultural and food scene, a legendary nightlife and prices that attract growing numbers of visitors. The scar of the Palace of the Parliament still dominates the skyline, a reminder of a past the city does not hide, while Bucharest reinvents its place as one of the great capitals of the east of the continent.
