Semenic-Cheile Carașului
Europe's largest virgin beech forest sits above a nineteen-kilometre limestone gorge — and below the Banat's mining country, reached by the oldest mountain railway in Romania.
The Semenic massif is a water tower. Four rivers rise in or around it — the Nera, the Timiș, the Bârzava and the Caraș — and the plateau on top is among the wettest places in Romania, which is the single fact that explains the rest of the park. The high point is Vârful Piatra Goznei at 1,447 metres, with Vârful Semenic itself two metres lower. The park covers 36,664 hectares across the Semenic and Aninei mountains, proposed in 1982, designated by Legea 5/2000 and delimited in 2003, and it holds ten strictly protected reserves inside its boundaries.
The rain has built two very different things. Downhill, in the limestone, it has cut Cheile Carașului — eighteen or nineteen kilometres of gorge with walls rising a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty metres, cave mouths opening at all heights on them, and the Caraș itself resurging in force at Izvoarele Carașului after a stretch underground. Peștera Comarnic runs to 6,203 metres on three levels through a hundred metres of vertical range, richly concretioned, and about a kilometre and a half of it is on the show route; Popovăț, three kilometres away, adds another 1,120 metres of protected passage. Uphill, on the deep soils of the Nera headwaters, the same rainfall has grown Izvoarele Nerei — the largest virgin forest in Romania at some fifty square kilometres, beech that has never been cut, standing volumes between six hundred and twelve hundred cubic metres to the hectare, individual trees over four hundred years old, more than a metre and a quarter thick and fifty metres tall. It was inscribed by UNESCO in July 2017 as a component of the transnational serial site covering Europe's ancient and primeval beech forests.
Around the edges the Banat is industrial, and old at it. The Reșița ironworks fired up on 3 July 1771 and the site has been in production ever since, one of the longest continuously industrial places in Europe. Coal was found on the Valea Purcariu by a forestry worker named Mathias Nikolaus Hammer, and to move it to the Danube the Austrians built the Oravița–Anina railway, inaugurated on 15 December 1863: the first mountain railway in Romania, climbing 339 metres in 33.4 kilometres through fourteen tunnels and over nine viaducts, and known ever since as the Banat Semmering. It is a class A historic monument and still carries passengers. The counterpoint arrived a century later at Anina, where a Ceaușescu-era power station designed to burn local oil shale consumed something close to a billion dollars — approaching half the cost of the House of the People — ran for roughly eight thousand hours across four years, and was shut down after a major failure in 1988, having never had enough fuel dug for it in the first place.
What's worth knowing before you go
Reșița is the road hub and Anina the nearest town, but the right way in is to take the train to Oravița and ride the 1863 line up — the approach is itself the monument. Carașova is the trailhead for the gorge, with a blue-triangle route of 9.2 kilometres running through to Comarnic. Note the cave's opening hours before building a day around it: Comarnic runs May to September, weekends only, and will not take a group smaller than five. Semenic is a ski station and the plateau holds heavy snow and a great deal of fog; the gorge, being low, is good in the shoulder seasons, though the Caraș runs high in spring. If you are looking at July dates, check whether the Gărâna jazz festival is on — accommodation for thirty kilometres around disappears that weekend.
At Navesul Mare there is a giant sequoia. Sequoiadendron giganteum, over a hundred and fifty years old, forty-five metres tall and five point seven metres around — planted by Austrian foresters trying out a Californian novelty, and now standing head and shoulders above the beeches it was set among.