Romania's geography: a mountain arc with a country inside it

Why the relief is arranged in rings

Romania lies between 43° and 49° north and between 20° and 30° east, and covers 238,397 square kilometres. The Carpathians enter in the north, run south-east down the eastern side of the country, turn west along the southern edge and then break into the lower blocks of the west. The arc is more than 1,000 kilometres long, covers about 71,000 square kilometres and is nowhere more than 100 kilometres wide. It is very nearly a closed shape with one side missing, and what completes it is water: the Danube along the south and the west, the Black Sea in the east.

Around that arc the ground sorts itself by height. Mountains take 23% of the surface, hills 35% and plains 39%, and the sequence from summit to floodplain repeats whichever way a traveller leaves the range. Inside the arc the land drops to the Transylvanian Plateau. Outside it drops through a fringe of hills, then through a belt of tablelands, then onto plain, and finally to the Danube.

The historic provinces follow that geometry, and none of them is an administrative unit any longer. Transylvania is the country enclosed by the arc, with Maramureș beyond the mountains to its north-west, Crișana along the Hungarian border and Banat in the south-west. Moldavia runs from the Eastern Carpathians to the Prut. Wallachia lies south of the mountains and is split by the Olt into Oltenia in the west and Muntenia in the east. Dobruja is the block between the lower Danube and the sea. Administration today runs on 41 counties and the city of Bucharest, which has its own status.

The recorded land boundary is 3,149.9 kilometres and the coast adds 245 kilometres. The five country-by-country figures below sum to 2,955 kilometres, so the published totals do not agree with one another, and neither source explains the gap.

The extreme points are the village of Horodiștea in Botoșani county on the Ukrainian border, the town of Zimnicea in Teleorman on the Bulgarian border, the village of Beba Veche in Timiș where the Hungarian and Serbian borders meet, and the town of Sulina in Tulcea. Sulina stands in the Danube Delta, which means the easternmost point of the country is ground the river deposited.

What the Carpathian ranges are made of

The arc is low to medium in altitude and deeply broken. Fourteen ranges rise above 2,000 metres, and the highest ground is Moldoveanu Peak at 2,544 metres with Negoiu close behind at 2,535 metres. Longitudinal and transverse valleys fragment the whole length of it, several major rivers cut straight across it, and some of the summit passes stand as high as 2,256 metres. Erosion has left platforms of tableland at considerable height, and permanent settlement reaches above 1,200 metres. The Olt, the Jiu and the Danube each open a route through, roads and railways use those valleys, and traces of the Roman way across the mountains are still visible.

The Eastern Carpathians are the forested end of the arc. Their westernmost ridge is an extinct volcanic range whose cones and craters survive, and the depressions between the ridges are large enough to hold cities, farmland and mining towns; Brașov sits in the largest of them. Mineral water springs there feed a line of health resorts.

The Southern Carpathians, also called the Transylvanian Alps, carry the height and the ice. More than 150 glacial lakes sit in their upper basins, wide grassland covers much of the rest, and there is little subsoil mineral worth working. Wind and rain have cut the rock into figures at altitude, of which the ones called the Sphinx and Babele, in the Bucegi, are the best known.

The Western Romanian Carpathians are the lowest of the three and the most densely settled. Deep structural depressions cut them into blocks and those gaps have worked as gates for as long as anyone has crossed them, easy to pass and easy to hold. The Iron Gate on the Danube is one. In the Apuseni, at the northern end of this group, permanent settlement reaches its highest point in the country, and the limestone underneath holds the Scărișoara cave, the Bears' Cave and the gorge at Turda.

Where the plateau sits inside the arc

Enclosed by the mountains on every side is the Transylvanian Plateau, a country of undulating plain and low hill that is the largest tableland in Romania. It is farmed, and it is the centre of the country in a literal sense: everything else is outside a wall.

The outer ring begins with the Sub-Carpathians, a fringe of rolling ground between 396 and 1,006 metres that follows the mountains along the south and the east. The Western Hills do the same job on the other side at slightly lower elevations. Beyond them come three tablelands: the Getic to the south of the Sub-Carpathians, the Moldavian in the east between the Sub-Carpathians and the Prut, and the Dobrujan in the south-east between the Danube and the Black Sea. All of this middle ground carries settlement, orchards and vineyards, because it is well drained without being steep.

The plains lie beyond. In the south the lower Danube Plain is divided by the Olt, with the Wallachian Plain to the east of the river, including the gap between the mountains and the Prut known as the Focșani Gate, and the Oltenian or Western Plain to the west. The soils here are chernozemic and this is the country's main farming region. Irrigation is used across it, and the marshland of the Danube floodplain has been diked and drained to add tillable ground.

How the rivers run out of the mountains

Drainage is radial. Rivers rise on the central crown of the Carpathians and run east, west and south, which means no single valley organises the country the way one river organises a long narrow state. In the east the Siret and the Prut collect them. In the south they go straight into the Danube. In the west they are collected by the Tisza on Hungarian territory, so even the water that leaves Romania rejoins the same river further downstream.

Virtually every Romanian river is a Danube tributary, directly or indirectly, and together they supply close to 40% of the river's discharge by the time it reaches the sea. The Olt, at 615 kilometres, is the longest river lying entirely inside the borders; the Mureș, the Prut, the Siret, the Someș, the Argeș and the Ialomița carry the rest. They are fed by rainfall and by melting snow, so discharge fluctuates heavily through the year and flooding can be severe.

The Danube enters at Baziaș in the south-west and travels about 1,075 kilometres through or along Romanian territory, close to 40% of its entire length, forming the frontier first with Serbia and then with Bulgaria. It is navigable by river vessel along the whole of that course and by seagoing ship as far upstream as the port of Brăila. Where it forces through the Carpathian gorges at the Iron Gates it drives a hydroelectric station of 2,200 MW. Its usefulness has limits that are also geographic: marshy banks and perennial flooding impede navigation in places, and the river runs at a distance from most of the industrial centres that would use it.

Standing water is abundant and small. More than 3,500 lakes are recorded, and the largest of them, Razelm, covers 511 square kilometres.

Where the Danube ends and the coast begins

After almost 3,000 kilometres from its source the Danube arrives at the northern edge of Dobruja, splits into three branches and stops. What it has built there is the Danube Delta, 5,800 square kilometres of marsh, floating reed island and sandbank standing a few metres above sea level. This is the lowest ground in Romania, and the country's lowest point is the Black Sea itself at zero metres.

The delta is a biosphere reserve and a World Heritage site, and 1,688 plant species alone have been counted in it. It supplies a large part of the national fish catch, its reeds are cut for cellulose, and some of its villages, Sfântu Gheorghe among them, can be reached only by boat. The Danube Delta is also the reason the eastern extremity of Romania is soft ground: Sulina, the easternmost town, sits on sediment carried down from central Europe.

South of the delta the coast runs for 245 kilometres to the Bulgarian border. The territorial sea extends 12 nautical miles, the contiguous zone 24, and the exclusive economic zone covers 23,627 square kilometres. The continental shelf claim is stated by depth: 200 metres, or as far as exploitation reaches. That short coast is the outlet for a country whose rivers otherwise all end up in the same place, and it is the one stretch of Romania where the ground has no relation to the Carpathians at all.

Why the rain falls away towards the east

The climate is continental, with four marked seasons: winter from November to March, a spring so short it sometimes fails to appear, summer from May to August, and a long autumn through November. The Carpathians do the sorting here as well. They block Atlantic air masses, so oceanic influence and its milder winters and heavier rain stay in the west and the centre. They also block the continental air of the plain to the north in Ukraine, which pushes frosty winters and low rainfall into the south and the south-east. In the far south-east there is a Mediterranean influence, and in Dobruja the Black Sea moderates the coast.

Average annual temperature is 11 °C in the south and 8 °C in the north. Bucharest averages about −3 °C in January and 23 °C in July, summer maxima there average 28 °C, and readings above 35 °C are common in the lower-lying parts of the country. In winter the average maximum is below 2 °C. The recorded extremes are 44.5 °C in south-eastern Romania on 10 August 1951 and −38.5 °C in central Romania on 24 January 1942, a spread of 83 degrees between two points in the same small country.

What grows on the land and what is protected

Land use was estimated in 1993 at 41% arable, 21% permanent pasture, 29% forest and woodland, 3% permanent crops and 6% other, with 31,020 square kilometres under irrigation in the same estimate. Undisturbed forest covers almost 27% of the territory. Romania scored 5.95 out of 10 on the 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index, which measures how heavily worked a forest is and not how much of it there is.

Six terrestrial ecoregions meet inside the borders: Balkan mixed forests, Central European mixed forests, East European forest steppe, Pannonian mixed forests, Carpathian montane conifer forests and Pontic steppe. Natural and semi-natural ecosystems account for about 47% of the land area, a figure that is high because the mountains and the delta are both difficult to convert.

Some 3,700 plant species have been identified. Of those, 23 are declared natural monuments, 74 are recorded as extinct, 39 as endangered, 171 as vulnerable and 1,253 as rare. The animal count runs to 33,792 species, of which 33,085 are invertebrate and 707 vertebrate. About 400 species of mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian are unique to the country, and the Carpathians hold roughly half of Europe's brown bears outside Russia and a fifth of its wolves. Those figures are a direct consequence of an arc of forested mountain that was never cleared for farming.

Protection covers almost 10,000 square kilometres, about 5% of the territory, across 13 national parks and three biosphere reserves. Two listings are international: the Danube Delta, and the Romanian components of the primeval beech forests recorded across the Carpathians and elsewhere in Europe.

What lies under the plateau and the plains

The subsoil follows the same rings as the surface. Under the Transylvanian Plateau are large deposits of methane gas and of salt. Under the Sub-Carpathians and the tablelands are brown coal and natural gas. In the Eastern Carpathians are ore bodies including gold and silver. The national list of resources runs to petroleum with reserves described as steady to declining, natural gas, coal, iron ore, salt, timber, arable land and hydropower.

Salt is the oldest of these by a wide margin. The site at Poiana Slatinei near Lunca, in Neamț county, holds the earliest known evidence of salt exploitation in Europe, with production beginning between the fifth and fourth millennium BC. The mines still open are at Turda, Praid, Cacica, Slănic Prahova and Ocnele Mari, with salt lakes at Ocna Sibiului, and several of them are worked now as visitor sites and for the treatment of respiratory conditions.

The hazards are seismic and gravitational. Earthquakes are most severe in the south and the south-west, and the combination of geological structure and climate promotes landslides across much of the hill country. The published environmental record for the country lists soil erosion and degradation, water pollution, air pollution in the south from industrial effluent, and contamination of the delta wetlands. The delta therefore appears on two registers at once, as a biosphere reserve and as a contaminated wetland.