Cheile Nerei-Beușnița
Romania's longest gorge and its warmest corner — twenty kilometres of Nera canyon, travertine waterfalls, and a karst lake that never freezes.
This is the warm corner of Romania. The Banat sits open to the south, the winters are mild, and the limestone of the Munții Aninei and Munții Locvei carries a flora with distinctly sub-Mediterranean company — orchids in quantity, Balkan species that get no further north. Through it the Nera has cut some twenty-two kilometres of valley, of which about twenty are true gorge, the longest in the country. The park runs to 36,758 hectares, listed by Legea 5/2000 and delimited by HG 230/2003, and it gathers up half a dozen older reserves inside itself, including Izvorul Bigăr and Cheile Șușarei.
What the limestone does here is build rather than only dissolve. The water comes out of the rock saturated with calcium carbonate, and where it spills over a lip it deposits travertine — so the falls grow their own ledges, slowly, outward, and the pools below them are the flat turquoise that only carbonate water produces. Cascada Beușnița, fifteen metres over stepped tufa, is the one everybody photographs. A short walk away is Ochiul Beiului, a small karst lake three and a half metres deep and fed by a spring that holds it between five and seven degrees all year, so it has never been known to freeze; its colour shifts through the seasons from green to a hard blue. Deeper into the gorge, Lacul Dracului — the Devil's Lake, Romania's largest karst lake at around seven hundred square metres and twelve to thirteen metres deep — sits in the hole left when a cave ceiling collapsed into the water table.
The travertine also demonstrates its own impermanence. Bigăr, the moss-covered dome in the north of the park where a spring fanned out over a boulder on the Miniș, was for a decade the most photographed waterfall in Romania. On the evening of 7 June 2021 the cantilevered plate of travertine broke off and fell into the river. Romsilva and the state geologists put it down to ordinary physics — the deposit had grown heavier than the rock could carry — and publicly rejected claims that a nearby trout farm's water abstraction was responsible, though the dispute has never entirely settled. Visitor numbers fell from around seventy-five thousand a year to a quarter of that, and the fall is slowly rebuilding itself. Human history in the park is written in metal rather than stone: Sasca Montană, first documented in 1717, was developed for copper, lead and silver by the Austrians from 1718 onward, colonised with miners brought in from Austria, Hungary and Oltenia, and worked on and off until the flotation plant closed in 1998.
What's worth knowing before you go
The gorge has two ends and no through road. Sasca Română is the northwestern entrance, reached via Oravița and Sasca Montană; Șopotu Nou is the southeastern, off the DN57B from Bozovici. Oravița is the nearest railway station, at the end of the historic line from Anina. Beușnița and Ochiul Beiului are an easy walk from Cantonul Damian and are correspondingly busy on summer weekends — the deep gorge sheds the crowds within a kilometre. The governing variable is water: the through-route along the Nera involves fords and a series of tunnels cut into the cliff, and after heavy rain or during the spring melt the river makes the whole thing impassable. The sub-Mediterranean climate means April, May, September and October are all genuinely usable, which is not true of most Romanian mountains.
The connoisseur's detail is a coordinate. The forty-fifth parallel crosses the park at Bigăr and is marked on the ground with a panel: the waterfall stood almost exactly halfway between the equator and the North Pole.