Retezat

Retezat was first, and it was argued for rather than simply proclaimed. The botanist Alexandru Borza had been campaigning since the late 1920s — "we need a law for the protection of nature" — and with Emil Racoviță and Andrei Popovici-Bâznoșanu behind him, the Council of Ministers signed the massif into existence on 22 March 1935, some thirteen thousand hectares of what had been the Kendeffy family's hunting domain. Borza called it the gigantic sanctuary of nature. The park now runs to 38,047 hectares in Hunedoara, and it has kept accumulating designations since: a strict scientific reserve at Gemenele from 1955, administered directly by the Romanian Academy and closed to visitors without a permit; a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1979; its own administration in 1999.

The mountain has two halves that meet near Lake Bucura. To the northeast, Retezatul Mare is crystalline — schists and granodiorite, glaciated hard during the Riss and Würm into cirques, hanging valleys and moraine-dammed tarns, and carrying twenty summits over two thousand metres with Peleaga at 2,509 the highest, Păpușa a metre behind it. To the southwest, Retezatul Mic is a thick monoclinal slab of Jurassic limestone, and behaves like a different range entirely: dolines, caves, and the Avenul din Stâna Tomii dropping 137 metres, one of the deepest shafts in the country. The lakes are what people come for — around eighty of them, of which some sixty hold water year-round. Bucura, at 2,040 metres in the cirque under Peleaga, is the largest glacial lake in Romania at 8.9 hectares; Zănoaga, circular in the Judele cirque, is the deepest at 29 metres.

Botanically this is one of the richest places in the Carpathians: some twelve hundred vascular plants, about a third of the Romanian flora, ninety of them endemic taxa, and enough diversity in the hawkweeds that Retezat is recognised as a genetic centre for the genus Hieracium. The most interesting inhabitants, though, are not native in the strict sense. Alpine marmots died out in Romania by the end of the nineteenth century, and in 1973 the Academy's natural-monuments commission released seventeen animals brought from Salzburg into these cirques. They took, spread, and now number in the thousands.

What's worth knowing before you go

Nucșoara is the gateway village, reached from the DN66 at Ohaba de sub Piatră — the halt on the Simeria–Petroșani railway, in service since 1884 — and it has the visitor centre where the ten-lei ticket is sold. From there a forest road runs seven kilometres to the Cârnic car park and the huts at Pietrele and Gențiana. Gura Zlata and Gura Apei give access from the west; Câmpu lui Neag on the DN66A from the Jiu Valley is the way into Retezatul Mic and Cabana Buta.

The season is short and the accommodation situation is the thing people get wrong. Snow lies on the ridges for most of the year and névé survives in the high cirques into August, so July to September is the practical window, with September offering the same ground in better light and thinner crowds. The refuges at Buta, Poiana Pelegii, Bucura and Zănoaga are Salvamont posts, not accommodation: they may be occupied by walkers only in emergencies and with the rescue service's agreement. The park's own advice is to bring a tent, and camping is confined to nine named sites. Above Bucura, take a moment over the marmots — you are watching a documented restoration, Austrian animals put back by decree into a Romanian mountain, and almost nobody standing there knows it.