Bucharest

Why Bucharest works

Bucharest earned its old "Little Paris" nickname from a wave of French-influenced architecture built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the city's elite modelled its boulevards, parks, and even a scaled-down Arc de Triomphe on the French capital. That era's grandest surviving buildings cluster around Calea Victoriei and the Romanian Athenaeum, a domed 1888 concert hall considered one of the finest in Europe and still home to the George Enescu Philharmonic. At the opposite architectural extreme sits the Palace of the Parliament, commissioned by Nicolae Ceaușescu in the 1980s — the second-largest administrative building on Earth after the Pentagon, with over a thousand rooms, marble sourced from across Romania, and a scale so vast that entire tour groups can get lost inside. The Old Town (Lipscani), largely pedestrianised, has been restored into Bucharest's main nightlife district, its narrow streets lined with restored merchant houses now holding bars, craft breweries, and late-night terraces that keep going well past midnight. Herăstrău Park, one of Europe's largest urban parks, offers a quieter counterpoint, its lakeside paths and the open-air Village Museum — a collection of traditional Romanian houses relocated from across the country — giving a sense of rural Romania without leaving the capital. Bucharest's low prices relative to Western Europe extend to its increasingly well-regarded restaurant scene.

Trip Snapshot

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