The Best Castles in Transylvania, Ranked Honestly
Romania has more castles than it has good roads to reach them. Here is which ones repay the driving, and which are better as a photograph.
Peleș Castle — the one that actually deserves the queue
Peleș is not medieval and does not pretend to be. It was finished in 1914 for Carol I, the first king of Romania, who wanted a Bavarian hunting palace in the Carpathians and had the treasury to get one. The result is a hundred and sixty rooms of carved walnut, Murano glass and Cordoba leather, with the first central vacuum system in Europe and an electricity plant of its own.
It closes on Mondays and Tuesdays, the ground-floor tour takes about ninety minutes, and the queue is worst between eleven and two. From Brașov it is fifty minutes over the Predeal pass, which makes an early start easy.
Bran Castle — famous for the wrong reason, good anyway
Bran has almost nothing to do with Vlad Țepeș and nothing at all to do with Bram Stoker, who never came to Romania. What it does have is a genuinely dramatic site on a rock above the pass, and interiors furnished by Queen Marie in the 1920s, which are more charming than any vampire display.
Go early. By half past ten in summer the narrow staircases are a queue rather than a castle. It is thirty-five minutes from Brașov, which means an arrival before the Bucharest coaches is entirely possible with your own car.
Râșnov Fortress — the view nobody books for
Râșnov was a peasant citadel, built so the villagers had somewhere to survive a siege rather than somewhere for a lord to live. That gives it lanes, houses and a well dug 146 metres into the rock, and a terrace with the best view of the Bran corridor there is.
Twenty minutes from Brașov, an hour on site, and it pairs perfectly with Bran on the same afternoon.
Bánffy Castle — a ruin being rescued, slowly
The 'Versailles of Transylvania' at Bonțida was gutted by retreating troops in 1944 and then by forty years of neglect. It is being restored by hand, in public, and it is worth seeing precisely because it is unfinished. It sits near Cluj, three and a half hours from Brașov, which puts it beyond a comfortable day trip from here.
How we would spend one castle day from Brașov
Peleș at opening, lunch in Sinaia or Râșnov, Bran mid-afternoon once the coaches have left. Two castles, roughly nine hours, and no part of the day spent waiting behind a group of forty.
Turn this into a day
Our planner takes the places above, puts them in the right order for the day you choose, checks what is open, and shows the price before you commit to anything.