Buila-Vânturarița

At 4,186 hectares this is the smallest of the thirteen, and its boundary is drawn around a single geological object: the strip of Jurassic limestone that runs some fourteen kilometres along the southern edge of the Munții Căpățânii, nowhere more than two and a half kilometres wide. The crest rises from 550 metres where the Bistrița leaves the mountain to 1,885 at Vânturarița Mare, with Buila itself at 1,849, and a third of the ground stands between forty and sixty degrees while the cliff faces reach eighty or ninety. Four rivers cut clean through the ridge — the Bistrița, Costești, Cheia and Olănești — slicing it into segments, and the Bistrița gorge is described in Romanian sources as the narrowest limestone canyon in the country.

The park owes its existence to an NGO. Asociația Kogayon researched and campaigned for it through the early 2000s, the government declared it by decree on 30 November 2004, and the association still co-administers the park with Romsilva — an arrangement that is rare in Romania. What it protects, besides the ridge, is a set of caves: Peștera Liliecilor at the north end of Bistrița village runs 250 metres, is electrified and open, and contains two rock churches, Ovidenia and Sfinții Arhangheli, that the monastery's monks built inside it. Hermits were living in the cave in the Middle Ages; the monks Macarie and Daniel put up a hermitage there in 1635.

Monastic building is in fact the dominant human trace along the whole crest. Bistrița monastery below was founded by the Craiovescu boyars between 1492 and 1494, razed to the foundations by Mihnea Vodă in 1509 and rebuilt under Neagoe Basarab; Arnota above it was founded by Matei Basarab in 1633 and holds his tomb. Highest and least visited is Schitul Pătrunsa, built in 1740 by Climent, bishop of Râmnic, on the exact spot where his mother had given birth to him while fleeing a Turkish incursion over the mountain — which is what the name records. Against all of that sits the other thing the ridge carries. In 1960 a limestone quarry was opened in the Arnota massif at Costești to feed the soda works at Govora, and its exploitation perimeter and the national park's boundary overlap, by way of two government decisions that contradict each other. Mining on protected land is illegal, the reserves are worked out, and expanding would require legislation handing part of a national park to a quarry. It has not been resolved.

What's worth knowing before you go

Costești is the gateway commune and three of the park's six entry points are in it, on the Bistrița and Costești valleys. Horezu, ten kilometres away, is the market town — and the reason many people are in the area at all, since Brâncoveanu's monastery of Hurezi has been on the World Heritage List since 1993 and Horezu ceramics were inscribed as intangible heritage in 2012. Get there on the DN67 from Râmnicu Vâlcea, about forty-five kilometres, then the DJ646A; the alternative approach is via Băile Olănești. There is no useful railway. Cabana Cheia is the only hut inside the park and the drive to it involves twenty-three kilometres of forest road.

The ridge walks from roughly May to October. The hazard is not snow depth but the rock itself — a knife-edge with near-vertical faces, lethal when wet and serious mountaineering under early or late snow. Bears are present, and because this is a small forested park pressed up against villages and orchards, the odds of meeting one are proportionally higher here than in an alpine park.

The thing worth the two-hour walk above Bărbătești is Pătrunsa: a hermitage founded by a bishop to mark the place his mother bore him under the mountain, and almost nobody who comes for the Horezu pottery knows it is there.