Having A Great Time In Cluj-Napoca, Romania With The Kids

Hello from Romania! We are spending eleven days in this amazing country. To get here, we drove from Krakow through Slovakia and Hungary—we spent four days in the High Tatras in Slovakia (in Poprad) and two nights on a farm outside Debrecen, Hungary, near the Romanian border. We had a great time passing through those locations, and some highlights included going for a beautiful hike in the High Tatras, and enjoying Hungarian meals cooked by our Airbnb hostess.

We had planned on writing a single post to cover Romania, but we’ve seen so many incredible things that we’re going to split the posts a little by location. In this post, we’ll cover our time in Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s second biggest city, which is an under-the-radar and totally awesome destination! We’ll surely make this point in this post and in subsequent posts on Romania, but we’ve been wowed by our time in this country. There are some stereotypes attached to Romania (like that it is poor or full of gypsies), but these negative and unfair stereotypes mask a beautiful country with a long history that has rapidly become one of our favorite countries we’ve visited. In Romania you can soak up history, admire the beautiful architecture and visit amazing sites without the crowds you encounter in better-known European cities. It really is an undiscovered gem!

Cluj-Napoca is towards the northern side of the country and is supposedly considered the unofficial capital of Transylvania. It is a very lively university city with a long history that pre-dates the Romans who lived there (the “Cluj” part of the name is what the Romans called the city). It’s been settled since at least 500 B.C. The people there are very friendly and were interested in chatting us up–language hasn’t been an issue as most people have spoken at least some (or perfectly fluent) English (or Spanish). Cluj-Napoca is a beautiful city sitting among hills, with a very large main square, an old city center, beautiful churches, historic buildings, and a lot of interesting sights. And it was easy to move around with Uber! (Side note: thus far on the trip we’ve taken Uber without issues in Dubai, Paris, Ukraine, and Romania!)

Here are some of the things we did in the city:

• Visited the main square, Piata Uniiri. The main square has a large gothic cathedral fronted by a huge statue of Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary in the 15th century. He was born in Cluj (which at that time was part of the Hungarian kingdom) and was a famous ruler who championed the arts, won major military campaigns, signed peace treaties, and supposedly walked among his people disguised as a commoner. Kids are free to climb on the statue, which has a castle-like base, and Hugo and Valentina loved spending time in the square scrambling around the statue with other kids.

• We visited the Botanical Gardens, which online resources describe as a “must see” in the city. They were really great, and we’d agree that it’s a wonderful place to visit, especially with kids. There is a nice Japanese garden inside, a Roman garden (with Roman artifacts), and many beautiful flowers and paths for kids to explore freely. Most of the paths were shaded, making it a specially pleasant place to visit during the summer months!

• Visited the Central Park. This is a nice park near a small river that runs through the city. There is tons of space to play and run around to burn energy. Hugo made a friend here and they spent a long time racing on the paths and jumping over the creek with each other. Parks are a wonderful place for our kids to meet other kids and have some good playtime!

• We visited Salinas Turda, aka the Turda Salt Mines, which are an otherwordly sight. The salt mine was started in the 16th century and it’s now an absolutely enormous cavern with ripply black walls (all salt) filled with attractions like a ferris wheel, playground, bowling, table tennis, pool, and so on. On a lower level (about 40 stories below the surface), there is a lake that you can row around on in a little boat. Joe kept expecting to meet Golem down there! The whole place looks like it is something from a science fiction movie. And apparently it’s been described in major publications as one of the most interesting things to see on the planet. We’d agree that it was really awesome. You have to take an elevator down into it (or steep slippery stairs that are too tricky for little kids) and the elevator only holds 7 people, so the only downside was long lines to get into the elevator (this is a very popular place, especially with Romanian tourists). We ended up carrying the kids back up the stairs to avoid waiting in a long elevator line, so we got a good workout too! As a side note, you can lick the walls (which are all salt) since no bacteria lives on the salt. This was especially fun for the kids since they don’t usually get to (or want to) lick walls! And the salty cave air is supposed to be very therapeutic too. This was one of the places we were most excited to see on the trip and it didn’t disappoint (especially if you look past the long elevator lines)!

There are other neat things to see and do in Cluj that we didn’t get around to. Since we didn’t find many online resources about visiting the city, here are some of the other top-listed things, in case it’s helpful to others:

• You can walk up Catatuia Hill, which is just across the river on the northern side of the old town, to get an amazing view of the city. The hill doesn’t look that big and the views we saw online looked great. (We couldn’t quite get there in the heat of August with the kids!)

• Turda Gorge is a very popular and awesome looking hike in Turda, south of Cluj. From what we researched, it sounds like there are three trails, two of which run through the entire gorge up to the other side. It supposedly takes 2-3 hours to walk one way and sounded too rigorous for our kids. But it looks like a really neat place to go for a long hike if you can swing it!

• The nightlife in Cluj is supposed to be incredible. We didn’t experience that, since the kids are usually in bed by 7pm, resting after the big day!

That’s all for now. We can’t wait to share more about this awesome country with you!