Experience the best of Sinaia

Sinaia takes its name from a monastery founded in the 1690s and named after Mount Sinai, and it grew into a royal summer resort in the nineteenth century. Peleș Castle, built in the 1870s and 1880s as the summer home of King Carol I, is a Neo-Renaissance palace with carved wooden interiors in a wooded valley above the town. The smaller Pelișor Castle stands nearby, and the early twentieth-century Casino overlooks a park in the centre.

A cable car climbs from the town towards the Bucegi plateau, where bare rock formations such as the Sphinx and the Babele stand above the treeline. Bușteni, the next town along the valley, lies beneath a huge cross on Caraiman peak built in the 1920s. Brașov, with its Gothic Black Church, lies to the north, and Bucharest is about 125 kilometres south by road.

Sinaia's cafés serve papanași, fried doughnuts of cheese topped with sour cream and jam, with hot chocolate in cold months, and pensions grill mici sausages after hikes. The railway line through the valley is busy with day-trippers from Bucharest. Snow covers the slopes in winter for skiing, and walkers have the high ridges to themselves after the summer crowds thin.