One Week in Romania: An Offbeat Itinerary
One week in Romania is enough for a full Transylvania loop, Bucharest, Peles, Brasov, Bran, Sighisoara and Sibiu, plus a genuine push north into Maramures for the wooden churches and the technicolor headstones of the Merry Cemetery. It is still not the whole country: Bukovina’s painted monasteries and the Danube Delta stay separate trips. Seven days is Romania’s actual sweet spot, long enough to do two regions properly instead of one region rushed.
Two days here is Bucharest alone , and three days adds one rushed Transylvania sampler day. Four days starts the loop this route runs at full length, five days closes that same loop properly, and 6 offbeat days keeps the identical spine at a slower pace. This one takes that finished loop and tacks on the region none of the shorter versions can afford: Maramures.
Book these before you go
- A Transylvania multi-day tour on GetYourGuide , worth comparing against a week of self-driving before you commit to renting a car
- A Maramures wooden churches tour on Viator , useful if you’d rather not navigate unmarked village roads on day six and seven yourself
- A room in Brasov’s old town on Booking.com , book it early since this is the loop’s busiest overnight stop
Everything below is priced in Romanian lei (RON), not the euro, Romania has no set date to join the eurozone. Romania is a full Schengen member end to end now, air and sea borders opened in March 2024 and the last land-border checks with Hungary and Bulgaria came down on 1 January 2025, so there’s no passport stamp anywhere on this route. US, UK, Canadian and Australian passports get the standard 90 days visa-free in any 180. ETIAS, the EU’s planned pre-travel check for visa-exempt visitors, has been delayed repeatedly and still isn’t running as of 2026, check the official ETIAS site before you fly if your trip is far out.
| Day | Focus | Rough daily RON |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bucharest: Palace of the Parliament, Old Town | 250-400 |
| 2 | Peles Castle at Sinaia, on to Brasov | 400-650 |
| 3 | Bran Castle, then Viscri’s fortified church | 350-600 |
| 4 | Sighisoara’s walled citadel | 300-500 |
| 5 | Sibiu | 300-500 |
| 6 | Long drive north to Maramures, a wooden church | 350-550 |
| 7 | The Merry Cemetery at Sapanta, transfer toward Cluj-Napoca | 300-500 |
Day 1: Bucharest, before you head for the hills
Land at Henri Coanda (OTP) and take Uber or Bolt into the city rather than an unmarked cab off the rank, taxi overcharging and petty theft, not violent crime, are Bucharest’s actual, minor risks. Book a Palace of the Parliament tour ahead of arrival, it’s guided-only with ID checked at the door, and the building’s scale, one of the largest administrative buildings anywhere, lands harder walked than read as a tonnage figure. Spend the evening in Lipscani, the Old Town’s cobbled core, and eat at Caru’ cu Bere or Hanul lui Manuc, both genuine 19th-century Bucharest institutions rather than menus built for tourists.
Day 2: Peles Castle, then Brasov
Head north through the Prahova Valley to Sinaia first. Peles Castle, built from the 1870s as King Carol I’s royal residence, is the sight that regularly out-impresses the castle everyone actually came for, carved wood and stained glass that reads as more genuinely royal than Bran’s bare stone rooms a couple of hours up the road. Continue to Brasov for the evening: the Black Church, Council Square, and the cable car up Mount Tampa if there’s daylight left. Overnight in Brasov, it’s the natural base for the next two days.
Day 3: Bran Castle, then the village the tour buses skip
Bran Castle in the morning, honestly (see below), then hand the afternoon to Viscri, one of the Saxon fortified-church villages that make up a genuine UNESCO listing : a working medieval defensive church, storks on the chimneys, and a pace slower than Bran’s car park. It sits over an hour down mostly unmarked roads, which is exactly why it stays quiet. Stop for a countryside walk and remember the Carpathians hold Europe’s largest brown bear population, roughly 5,000 to 6,000 animals; don’t approach or feed anything near a treeline, bear included.
Day 4: Sighisoara’s walled citadel
Sighisoara is the genuine article Bran only pretends to be: a walled medieval Saxon town, UNESCO-listed as a historic centre in its own right, and Vlad III’s actual, documented birthplace. Spend the day inside the walls, the Clock Tower, the covered Scholars’ Stairs, the citadel’s coloured houses, then stay the night inside or just outside the old town so the cobbled streets empty out by evening.
Day 5: Sibiu
Sibiu closes the Transylvania loop: a former European Capital of Culture with an old town of “eyes” windows peering from rooftops, the Bridge of Lies, and a slower pace than either Brasov or Sighisoara. Treat this as the hinge day, tomorrow’s drive is the longest of the trip, so use tonight to actually rest rather than push on to Maramures the same afternoon.
Day 6: The long drive to Maramures
Maramures sits far enough north that getting there eats most of a driving day, this is exactly why the ladder above stops one region short of here and why this itinerary treats it as a real seventh day rather than a side trip bolted onto the loop. The region’s UNESCO-listed wooden churches, tall shingled steeples built without a single nail, are spread across small villages rather than clustered in one town, so plan on stopping at whichever one sits closest to your route rather than chasing all eight in an afternoon. Overnight near Sighetu Marmatiei or one of the valley villages puts you close to Sapanta for the morning.
Day 7: The Merry Cemetery, then out through Cluj
Sapanta’s Merry Cemetery is the payoff for the whole detour: hundreds of bright blue wooden crosses, each hand-painted with a scene from the person’s life or death, some of them bluntly, darkly funny in a way most cemeteries never attempt. Give it a proper hour, it rewards slow reading, not a drive-by photo. Book an open-jaw flight home from Cluj-Napoca (CLJ) rather than backtracking to Bucharest, doubling back over hundreds of kilometres of mountain road for a same-day OTP departure burns a day this itinerary doesn’t have spare, and Cluj is Romania’s second-busiest airport, a genuinely shorter drive from Maramures than the capital is.
Is Bran Castle really Dracula’s castle?
No, not in any documented sense. The link between Bran and Vlad III (Vlad the Impaler) is tenuous at best, he never lived there, and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel is fiction, Stoker never visited Romania or saw the castle himself. Bran Castle’s own official site draws this same distinction rather than leaning into the myth. What’s actually on show is a genuine former royal residence of Queen Marie of Romania, worth the visit on its own history and architecture, and arguably outshone by Peles the day before.
Do you need a car for a week in Romania?
Yes, close to essential for this route. Trains reach Brasov and Sighisoara directly, but Sinaia, Bran, Viscri and especially Maramures don’t stitch together without a car or an organized tour; Viscri and the wooden churches both sit well off the rail network. A note on the Transfagarasan: it doesn’t feature in this route, but if you’re travelling roughly late June through October and want the detour, it connects the mountains south of Sibiu to the Arges valley; outside that window it’s closed for snow, so don’t build a winter or shoulder-season version of this trip around it.
Is a week enough to see Romania?
Seven days covers Transylvania properly plus one further region, Maramures on this route, and that’s genuinely a good week, not a compromise. It’s still only two of Romania’s five or six distinct regions; Bukovina’s painted monasteries, the Danube Delta and the Black Sea coast each need their own trip on top of this one. Check Romania.travel for how much the country covers beyond what fits here before assuming a week could ever close that gap.
One concrete tip: book the Peles Castle tour slot before anything else on this trip. Timed entries sell out over summer weekends faster than Bran’s, and losing that slot costs you the better castle on the route, not the famous one. Check gov.uk’s current Romania entry requirements and the US State Department’s Romania page close to your dates regardless.