Ninety seconds on Peleș Castle
Two thousand timed tickets a day, and the courtyard queue builds from eleven. Monday and Tuesday it is shut altogether, which catches day trips out of Bucharest more often than the queue does.
The summer residence of the country's first king, finished in 1883 and extended to 1914, in a German Renaissance style with 160 rooms, a theatre, a moving stained glass ceiling and the first castle in Europe wired for electricity from its own plant. The armoury holds about four thousand pieces.
Plastic overshoes are handed out at the door, and the ground floor runs one way, so the pace belongs to whoever is in front. The Hall of Honour is where the stop happens: carved walnut on every surface of a room that rises the full height of the building, lit from above. A guide forms up at the entrance at intervals and comes with the ticket, though joining one is optional and the rooms are labelled well enough to walk alone. An hour and a quarter covers the circuit. The terraces and the formal gardens below the walls take another half hour, and Pelișor stands a few hundred metres further up the same path for anyone with the appetite for a second interior.
The castle stopped being a royal residence in 1948, when it was nationalised, and opened as a national museum five years after that. It closed again in 1975, officially because the fabric had decayed far enough to need much of the collection moved into store, and it stayed shut until the regime fell. Ownership returned to the last king under a settlement concluded in 2007, on terms that left the Romanian state administering the place, which is still how it is run.
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