Romania has more Danube frontage than any other country, and almost nobody travels it. This is the whole of it on trains, buses and state ferries — the gorge where the river was once unnavigable, the island a reservoir drowned in 1970, and the arm that ends at kilometre zero in the Black Sea.
Timișoara
The Banat capital and the practical way in — low-cost flights land here and the Danube is two hours south. The 1989 revolution began on this square in December, when a crowd gathered to stop the eviction of a Hungarian pastor and did not go home. The city lit its streets electrically in 1884, before Vienna did, and was European Capital of Culture in 2023, which paid for the paint.
South to Băile Herculane
Down the main line through Caransebeș into the Cerna valley. The Romans bathed here and called it Ad Aquas Herculi Sacras; the Habsburgs rebuilt it from 1736 and the Austro-Hungarian bath houses that followed are the reason to come. Several are roofless and fenced, restoration has been starting and stopping for twenty years, and the thermal water still runs at about 50°C.
Orșova and the Cazane
Twenty minutes down the valley to the river. Take the afternoon boat upstream into the Cazanele Dunării, where the Danube squeezes between limestone walls to about 150 metres wide and drops to 50 metres deep. On the way: the Mraconia monastery at the waterline, rebuilt in the 1990s because the original is underneath, and a 55-metre head of Decebalus carved into the cliff between 1994 and 2004 by a Romanian businessman who paid for it himself — the tallest rock relief in Europe.
The dam at Gura Văii
Ten kilometres downstream is the thing that made all of this. Iron Gates I was agreed with Yugoslavia in 1963, built between 1964 and 1972, and produces about 2,100 megawatts split evenly between the two banks. It raised the river some 35 metres, drowned the rapids that had made the gorge unnavigable, and drowned a good deal else. The dam crest carries a road and a border post; the viewpoint above it is free.
Drobeta-Turnu Severin
A stone pier stands in the river below the museum, and its twin is across the water at Kostol on the Serbian bank. They are the visible remains of the twenty that carried the bridge Apollodorus of Damascus built for Trajan in AD 103–105 to move an army into Dacia, and it was the longest arch bridge in the world for more than a thousand years. The Iron Gates museum next to them covers the dam, the archaeology and the resettlement, and is better than its building suggests.
Șimian island
A short boat from the bank downstream of town. The fortress of Ada Kaleh was dismantled before the reservoir filled and the stones were barged here to be rebuilt. The rebuilding was never finished. What is on Șimian is a partial wall, a great deal of numbered masonry lying in the grass, and an argument about what a state owes the places it removes.
Downstream to Calafat
The gorge ends and the Danube spreads out into the flat, hot plain that feeds the country. Calafat faces Vidin across the water, and until 2013 that crossing was a ferry. Romania and Bulgaria share about 470 kilometres of river and had exactly one bridge between them from 1954 until the Calafat–Vidin span opened on 14 June 2013, which explains a lot about how little the two countries trade.
To Bucharest
East across Oltenia, changing at Craiova. Arrive in the afternoon and start with the Palace of the Parliament, which is the heaviest building on earth and required demolishing about a fifth of the historic city to stand where it does. The tour covers a small fraction of it and you need identification to get in.
Văcărești
A delta rehearsal inside the capital. Ceaușescu had a reservoir dug here in the 1980s, the concrete was poured, the project was abandoned, and the hole filled with groundwater and turned into reed bed. Otters and something over ninety bird species moved in, and in 2016 it was declared Romania's first urban natural park. Nobody designed it; the state simply stopped.
Cernavodă, then Tulcea
Train east to the bridge Anghel Saligny finished in 1895, which was the longest in Europe when it opened and carried the first railway across the lower Danube. Beside it is the western entrance of the Danube–Black Sea Canal, begun in 1949 with forced labour, abandoned in 1953 and finally opened in 1984. Then the bus north to Tulcea, where the delta administration and the ferries are.
Into the delta
The state ferry down the Sulina arm to Crișan, a village strung along both banks with no road at either end of it. Buy the biosphere reserve permit before you board or through your guesthouse. Evening is the time to be out in a small boat: the pelicans come off the lakes and the light on the reed goes flat and orange.
Mila 23 and the old river
A morning by boat into the Old Danube, the meander the engineers cut off when they straightened the Sulina arm in the nineteenth century. Mila 23 sits on it: a Lipovan village of Russian Old Believers who came here in the eighteenth century to get away from the reforms of the Orthodox church, and who produced Ivan Patzaichin, four Olympic canoeing golds, born in a house on this water.
Sulina
The last town on the river. From 1856 the European Commission of the Danube governed this stretch from here, cut the Sulina arm from roughly 84 kilometres to 63, and ran a free port with its own courts, hospital and lighthouse. The maritime cemetery has headstones in Greek, Russian, English, Turkish and Italian, and the old lighthouse now stands well inland because the coast has kept growing seawards.
Back upriver to Constanța
The early ferry to Tulcea, then the bus down the coast. Finish at the Carol I mosque in Constanța, where the carpet from the Ada Kaleh mosque was taken when the island went under — a gift from Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1904, laid on a floor 500 kilometres from where it was meant to be. The Roman mosaic edifice by the port is the other thing worth an hour.
Good to know
The delta runs on Navrom state ferries, which sail a fixed weekly pattern that changes with the season and is published only a few weeks ahead — book the first leg and buy the rest as you go, exactly as you would in the Aegean. Private fast boats fill the gaps at three or four times the price. Everyone entering the biosphere reserve needs a permit; guesthouses sell them and boatmen will ask to see one. The strict reserves, Letea and Sacalin among them, may only be entered with a licensed guide. Delta accommodation is sold half or full board because there is no restaurant, and that is not an upsell. Mosquitoes between May and August are genuinely bad and the repellent sold in Tulcea is better than what you brought. In winter the arms ice and the schedule collapses to almost nothing. On the river stretch, CFR trains are cheap and slow; buy InterRegio rather than Regio and reserve a seat. Romania is in the EU and Schengen but not the eurozone — leu only, and cash outside the towns.
Shorter or longer?
Three more days north from Crișan to C.A. Rosetti, Letea and Periprava on the Ukrainian border. Letea is sand dunes and oak woods hung with lianas, it is a strict reserve, and it needs a guide and a permit arranged before you arrive.
Fly to Bucharest, bus straight to Tulcea, and give six days to the Sulina arm and Mila 23. You lose the gorge, which is half the point of the route, and you gain time actually sitting still in a boat.