Munții Măcinului

Every other national park in Romania is in the Carpathians. This one is in Dobrogea, east of the Danube, and it is older than all of them by a factor that is hard to hold in the head: the granite here was folded up in the Hercynian orogeny, when Laurasia and Gondwana collided, and the park administration dates the formations to around 255 million years. These were mountains before there were dinosaurs. What is left after that much time is a pair of low crenellated ridges — Culmea Măcinului and Culmea Pricopanului, the park's two massifs — running to 11,321 hectares, with Vârful Țuțuiatul at 467 metres the high point of the whole of Dobrogea. The scale is small and the effect is not: bare granite tors, rounded and split, standing over treeless grassland, so that a four-hundred-metre hill manages to look alpine.

The vegetation stacks in the same short distance. Steppe grassland at the base gives way to oak woods mixed with hornbeam and the southern mojdrean, and then to open meadow on the crests — some two thousand plant species in all, seventy of them protected and twenty-seven endemic. The Balkan Moehringia jankae is the flagship; Campanula romanica and the pygmy carnation Dianthus nardiformis are Romanian endemics that grow on the Pricopan ridge, and the orchids include Orchis simia and O. purpurea. The birds are what bring specialists: more than two hundred species, and in autumn the ridges sit under a raptor flyway that has produced counts of over ten thousand birds of prey in a single migration season — golden and imperial eagles, short-toed snake eagles, griffon vultures passing through. The Egyptian vulture, which people still ask about, is no longer a Romanian breeder; it was the last of the country's four vulture species to go, at the end of the twentieth century, and today's birds are wanderers up from Bulgaria.

The granite has a second history. Industrial quarrying began in the late nineteenth century around Turcoaia and Greci — the largest granite workings in Romania — and from 1870 Italian stonemasons came to cut it, settling at Greci, where their descendants and an Italian community remain. The stone went out by ox cart, then by funicular and a purpose-built railway down to barges on the Danube, and it faces the CFR Palace in Bucharest, the Giurgiu bridge, the Bicaz dam and the House of the People. Quarrying inside the boundary was stopped when the park was declared, though the scars are still legible on the summits and the industry continues just outside it: the hill at Iacobdeal has been permanently lowered for road aggregate, and the flooded pit left behind is now a lake fed only by groundwater and rain, with no river running in or out of it.

What's worth knowing before you go

Măcin is the town at the foot of Pricopanului, and the park's own waymarked six-kilometre blue-stripe circuit — Sulucu Mare, Piatra Râioasă, Șaua Șerparu, Caramalău — starts from the town itself. Greci, below Țuțuiatul, is the other gateway and has a visitor centre. Access changed completely on 6 July 2023, when the Brăila suspension bridge opened over the Danube: a 1,120-metre central span, the longest suspension bridge in Romania, with a link road running to Măcin. What used to mean a ferry queue is now a short drive from Brăila, and Măcin is the first town you reach on the Dobrogean bank.

Come in April or May for the steppe flora and the orchids, or in autumn for the raptors. Summer is the wrong choice — this is the driest and hottest corner of the country, the crests carry no shade and no water, and the fact that a spring called Fântâna de Leac, the Curing Fountain, is a named landmark tells you how scarce water is here. There are no refuges; camp at the fountain or base yourself in Măcin or Greci. Snow is not the constraint. Crowds are not either, which after the Carpathian parks is the point.