Bran Castle
A medieval fortress on a rocky outcrop near Brașov, famous worldwide as “Dracula’s Castle”.
About
Bran stands on a rock at the mouth of a mountain pass, its white walls, red roofs and slim towers rising above the village below. A tangle of stairs and small courtyards connects around 60 rooms of different sizes.
The rooms hold furniture, tapestries and displays on the royal family who once lived here, and a secret staircase links the floors. Despite the Dracula marketing, the castle has little direct link to the novel’s character, so go for the setting and the history.
History
In 1377 King Louis I of Hungary granted the Saxon townspeople of Brașov permission to build a stone fortress here to guard the pass between Transylvania and Wallachia, and construction ran for about a decade. It served as a customs post and defensive stronghold on a trade route, and changed hands several times in later centuries. The link to Dracula is thin: Bram Stoker, who never visited Romania, described a castle in the Carpathians for his 1897 novel, and the later fame of Vlad the Impaler gave the castle an association that tourism embraced. Vlad III may at most have passed through the area, and there is no proof he ever stayed here. In 1920 the town of Brașov gave the castle to Queen Marie of Romania, who restored it as a summer home. After the communists took power the castle was nationalised, and in the 2000s it was returned to Marie’s heirs and opened as a museum.