The Prahova Valley is Romania's mountain playground: the corridor where Bucharest residents escape the heat and the asphalt to breathe Carpathian air. In barely fifty kilometres, the road and the railway climb from the Wallachian plain to the passes of Transylvania, linking long-established mountain resorts —Sinaia, Bușteni, Azuga, Predeal— at the foot of the dramatic walls of the Bucegi massif.
This is where the wild beauty of the high mountains meets the convenience of a tourist infrastructure more than a century old. Cable cars that take you above 2,000 metres in a few minutes, right next to the legendary rocks of Babele and the Sphinx; the Caraiman Cross, the tallest memorial cross in the world set on a mountain peak; waterfalls such as Urlătoarea; fairy-tale castles like the neo-Gothic Cantacuzino in Bușteni; and, in winter, the busiest ski slopes in the country. All less than two hours from the capital.
This guide covers the essentials of the Prahova Valley with a practical eye: what to see and do in Bușteni, Predeal and the surrounding area, how to ride the cable car up to Bucegi, how to get around on the handy valley train, when to go depending on whether you're after hiking or skiing, and how to combine it with Sinaia and its castles. The Prahova Valley is the easiest and most spectacular way to experience the Romanian Carpathians.
For centuries the Prahova Valley was a strategic mountain pass between Wallachia, a vassal principality of the Ottomans, and Transylvania, under the Habsburgs; its upper end, at Predeal, marked the border. Shepherds and woodcutters lived here, and the valley was a route for merchants and smugglers. Everything changed in the late 19th century, when King Carol I chose Sinaia for his summer castle (Peleș, 1873-1883) and the railway arrived: the court and the aristocracy turned the valley into the country's most fashionable summer resort, and towns such as Bușteni, Azuga and Predeal flourished with villas, hotels and spas. The First World War left its mark on the heights of Bucegi, where in the 1920s the monumental Caraiman Cross was built in memory of the fallen soldiers. Under communism, the valley became a mass holiday and winter sports destination for workers, with cable cars, hotels and ski resorts. Today the Prahova Valley is the most visited mountain area in Romania, very popular both in summer for hiking and in winter for skiing. 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 →They depart from Sinaia, 7 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 Prahova Valley was born as what it essentially still is: a way through. This natural corridor, carved out by the river Prahova between the walls of the Bucegi massif and the Baiu mountains, was for centuries one of the main routes connecting the lowlands of Wallachia, to the south, with the Transylvanian plateau, to the north, across the Carpathians.
For much of the medieval and early modern periods, that geography carried a tense political meaning. Wallachia was an autonomous principality but a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, while Transylvania fell within the Habsburg orbit. The upper part of the valley, around present-day Predeal, marked precisely the border between the two worlds, a boundary watched by customs posts and guard stations. Merchants, transhumant flocks, armies and smugglers all passed through here.
The people of the valley were above all shepherds and woodcutters, mountain folk used to hard winters. Sinaia Monastery, founded in 1695, was for almost two centuries the main settlement in the valley. Nothing suggested that those remote frontier places would become, in a short time, the most elegant summer destination in the country.
The fate of the Prahova Valley changed at its root at the end of the nineteenth century, and the engine of that change was the monarchy. In 1873, king Carol I of Romania, in love with these landscapes that reminded him of Germany, began building his summer residence at Sinaia, Peleș Castle, opened in 1883. The royal decision had an immediate pull effect: where the king went, the court went, and the aristocracy and the upper middle class behind it.
The arrival of the railway, which climbed the valley connecting Bucharest with Brașov across the Carpathians, was the other great catalyst. Suddenly the mountains were a few hours from the capital, and the villages of the valley — Sinaia, Bușteni, Azuga, Predeal — filled with summer villas, hotels, spas and casinos. Sinaia opened its Monte Carlo-style casino in 1913. Bușteni grew on the back of a paper mill and of tourism, and there prince Gheorghe Cantacuzino, 'the Nabob', raised his neo-Romanian castle in 1911.
In barely a generation, the Prahova Valley went from a frontier corridor of shepherds to Romania's 'mountain riviera', a fashionable place where polite society spent the summer, took the waters, strolled and began to explore the peaks of the Bucegi. It was the Romanian belle époque in its purest form.
The valley also became the cradle of Romanian mountaineering and hiking. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first mountain societies began to explore and waymark the peaks of the Bucegi massif, to build huts (cabane) and to open the trails hikers still follow today. Its closeness to Bucharest and the arrival of the railway made these the most accessible and best known mountains in the country, a role the Prahova Valley has not lost since: whole generations of Romanians learned to walk in the high mountains here.
The First World War brought the fighting up into the mountains of the Prahova Valley. When Romania entered the war in 1916 on the Allied side, its troops fought in the Carpathian passes against the armies of the Central Powers. The Bucegi region and the valley were the setting for hard fighting, and much of the country, this area included, was occupied for months by German and Austro-Hungarian forces, while the court and the government took refuge in Iași.
Out of that fighting came one of the region's most emblematic monuments. Between 1926 and 1928, on the initiative of queen Marie and king Ferdinand, the Caraiman Cross was raised on the summit of Caraiman peak, at more than 2,200 metres, in memory of the Romanian railway workers and soldiers who fell in the Great War. Almost 30 metres tall, built high in the mountains with barely any resources, it is recognised as the tallest commemorative cross in the world standing on a mountain. Lit up at night, it became the symbol of the valley and a permanent reminder of that generation's sacrifice.
After the war, with the formation of Greater Romania and the incorporation of Transylvania, the old border at Predeal stopped being a boundary between empires and ended up inside the country. The valley carried on its life as a summer resort, now with the first winter sports appearing on its slopes as well.
The installation of the communist regime after the Second World War changed the meaning of the Prahova Valley. The villas and hotels of the aristocracy were nationalised, and the elite summer season gave way to mass tourism organised by the state: the trade unions sent workers on holiday to the mountains, large hotels and complexes were built, and the ski resorts were developed with cable cars and lifts. Sinaia, Bușteni, Predeal and Azuga became popular holiday and winter sports destinations within reach of the working class.
It was in this period that the cable cars now running up to the Bucegi plateau from Bușteni and Sinaia were installed, opening the high mountains — Babele, the Sphinx, the Caraiman Cross — to thousands of visitors who previously could only get there on foot. Skiing was democratised and the valley filled with tourist infrastructure, not always beautiful, but functional.
After the fall of communism in 1989, the Prahova Valley has been modernising and reinventing itself. It is still, by a distance, the most visited mountain area in Romania, very popular in summer — hiking in the Bucegi, castles, waterfalls — and in winter for its ski runs, the busiest in the country because they are close to Bucharest. The old castles and villas have been restored, new hotels and guesthouses have opened, and foreign visitors are slowly discovering this corridor where the history of Romanian royalty, the memory of the Great War and the wild beauty of the Carpathians come together less than two hours from the capital.
