There is a road in Romania that Top Gear called 'the best road in the world', and it is not TV hype: the Transfăgărășan is a ribbon of asphalt climbing into the Făgăraș Mountains, the highest in the Romanian Carpathians, stringing together impossible hairpin bends, tunnels cut into the rock, viaducts hanging over the void and viewpoints from which you can see half of Transylvania. It rises from green valleys to the glacial lake Bâlea, at 2.034 metres, and drops back down the other side through forests where brown bears sometimes appear.
It was built by Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime between 1970 and 1974 as a strategic military route to cross the mountains in case of invasion, at a huge human and economic cost: thousands of tonnes of dynamite were used and dozens of workers died. Today it has no military use at all, but it has become one of Europe's great scenic drives and a destination in its own right. You don't drive its 90 kilometres to get anywhere fast —in fact it is slow and winding— but to enjoy the journey, stop at every viewpoint and feel the mountains.
This guide tells you how to drive the Transfăgărășan: when it opens (only in summer and early autumn), where to start, what to stop and see —Lake Bâlea, the waterfall, the imposing Vidraru reservoir, Poenari Fortress, the real castle of Vlad the Impaler—, how to avoid the queues and where to sleep. A journey of bends, peaks and adrenaline across the roof of Romania.
The Transfăgărășan (DN7C) was born of a Cold War obsession. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Nicolae Ceaușescu feared the USSR might do the same to Romania and ordered a military road to be built across the Carpathians at an unexpected point, so that troops and tanks could be moved over the mountains. The works were carried out between 1970 and 1974, mostly by the army, in extremely harsh high-mountain conditions, with explosives, and with a death toll that official figures played down but is estimated at several dozen. The result was a feat of engineering that, ironically, never had any real military use. With the fall of communism in 1989 and the rise of tourism, the road became one of the most famous scenic routes on the planet, immortalised by the motoring press and visited every summer by hundreds of thousands of people. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The mountainous heart of Romania, a land of Saxon citadels, castles and minorities: a thousand years inside Hungary and the Habsburg empire before joining Romania in 1918, and the homeland of the Dracula myth.
Read the history of Transylvania →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. There are not many in Sibiu, but the ones there are worth it. 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. Tap the cards below and have a look.
They depart from Sibiu, 42 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Transfăgărășan was not born of a wish to admire the Carpathians or to make things easier for tourists: it was born of fear. Its story begins in August 1968, hundreds of kilometres from the summits of the Făgăraș mountains, when the tanks of the Warsaw Pact rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. Romania, governed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, refused to take part in that invasion and publicly condemned the Soviet intervention, a gesture of independence within the communist bloc that earned it applause in the West, but that also lit a very concrete fear in Bucharest: that the Soviet Union would do to Romania what it had done to Czechoslovakia.
Ceaușescu, obsessed with the idea of a possible Soviet invasion, ordered the country to be made ready to resist. Part of that strategy was to make sure the Romanian army could move troops and heavy equipment across the natural barrier of the Southern Carpathians even if the main routes were cut. The Făgăraș mountains, the highest in Romania, were precisely one of those obstacles: a wall of peaks topping 2,500 metres that separates Transylvania from Wallachia. Crossing them with a high mountain road, at an unexpected point, became a strategic goal. And so, out of a Cold War military calculation, came the order to build what we now know as the Transfăgărășan.
Work began in 1970 and went on until 1974. It was a titanic undertaking, carried out largely by units of the Romanian army along with civilian labour, on some of the most difficult terrain imaginable: almost vertical slopes, hard rock, altitudes of more than 2,000 metres, very long winters and a working window narrowed to the summer months. To open the way for the road, enormous quantities of explosives were used — estimates speak of thousands of tonnes of dynamite used to blast the rock of the mountain — and viaducts, retaining walls and the Bâlea tunnel were built, which at almost 900 metres is the longest road tunnel in Romania and pierces the ridge under the highest point.
The human cost was high and was wrapped in the fog of official propaganda. The regime's figures played the deaths down, speaking of only a few victims, but it is estimated that in reality several dozen workers and soldiers died from the explosions, rockfalls, accidents and the extremely harsh high mountain conditions. The road was also built in enormous haste and without the ideal technical planning for a route of that kind, which explains its extreme layout, its gradients and its very tight bends. It was officially opened in 1974 as the DN7C. And then came the great irony: that road conceived as a strategic military route never had any real military use. The feared Soviet invasion never happened, and the Transfăgărășan was left as an unintended monument to the paranoia of a regime.
Beyond its origin, the Transfăgărășan is a feat of engineering impressive in its own right. Over its roughly 90 kilometres, the road climbs from the northern valleys, around Cârțișoara (Sibiu county), to the saddle of the glacial lake Bâlea, at 2,034 metres of altitude, where it reaches its highest point before entering the tunnel that takes it to the other side of the mountain. From there it drops southwards, towards the great Vidraru reservoir and the town of Curtea de Argeș, in Wallachia.
The layout is a catalogue of challenges overcome: chains of hairpin bends climbing bare slopes, suspended viaducts, rock cuttings, more than 800 engineering structures between bridges and culverts, and the Bâlea tunnel piercing the ridge. The road crosses several vegetation levels, from the beech and conifer forests of the middle mountains to the bare alpine meadow of the heights, passing waterfalls such as Bâlea and Capra and glacial lakes suspended in glacial cirques. On the southern side, lake Vidraru — created by an arch dam of more than 160 metres finished in 1966 — adds another monumental element to the landscape. Precisely because of its exposure and its altitude, the upper stretch can only stay open a few months a year, from July to October, when the snow retreats and the danger of avalanches disappears; the rest of the year, the mountain gets its white silence back.
During the communist years, the Transfăgărășan was little more than a remote curiosity, lightly travelled and associated with the regime that had ordered it. Everything changed after the 1989 Revolution, which overthrew and executed Ceaușescu, and with Romania's opening to international tourism in the decades that followed. The road began to be rediscovered by travellers, motorcyclists and cyclists drawn by its scenery and its impossible layout.
The leap to worldwide fame came in 2009, when the British car programme Top Gear filmed an episode there and its presenter described it as the best driving road in the world, ahead even of legendary Alpine routes. That statement, repeated endlessly on the internet, turned the Transfăgărășan into a pilgrimage destination for motoring enthusiasts and a tourist symbol of Romania. Since then, every summer, hundreds of thousands of people go up to Bâlea by car, motorbike or bicycle, and the road appears on countless lists of 'roads to drive before you die'. Romania's other great mountain route, the Transalpina (higher still), benefits from the same pull. The Transfăgărășan thus went from imaginary deterrent weapon to tourism jewel, a turn that sums up the country's recent history rather well.
The Transfăgărășan does not only cross spectacular scenery: it passes some of the places most loaded with legend in Romania. On its southern side, perched above the Argeș valley, stands the fortress of Poenari, the genuine stronghold of Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth-century prince who centuries later inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Unlike the touristy Bran Castle, Poenari really was one of Vlad's residences, and he strengthened it — according to tradition — with the forced labour of the boyars who had betrayed him. Today you climb to its ruins by a staircase of almost 1,500 steps, with dizzying views.
The forests around the road are also territory of the Carpathian brown bear, whose population in Romania is the largest in Europe outside Russia. It is not unusual to see bears at the edge of the asphalt on the wooded stretches, sometimes drawn by the food that — irresponsibly and dangerously — some drivers give them; the authorities insist that you do not feed them or get out of the vehicle. At present, the Transfăgărășan lives with a tension typical of great tourist icons: it is an economic engine for the region and a source of national pride, but at the height of summer it suffers traffic jams, crowds and pressure on a fragile high mountain environment. Driving it early, with respect for nature and for its history, is still one of the great travel experiences in Europe: a road born of a dictator's fear that today hands freedom, bends and summits to anyone who dares to climb up to lake Bâlea.
