Driving nirvana on DN7C – it is a paved mountain road crossing the southern section of the Carpathian Mountains, more than 150 kilometers in length the Transfagarasan Highway is Romania’s most spectacular and best-known road thanks to an appearance on BBC Top Gear in 2009 (Jeremy Clarkson proclaimed that the Transfăgărășan was “the best road in the world”). Fully open only from June to October, the road’s highest point is at 2042 meters: It was built from 1970-1974 on the personal orders of Nicolae Ceausescu, who, legend has it, wanted to create a strategic route across the Fagaras Mountains to ferry troops north should Romania be invaded by the USSR (as Czechoslovakia had been in 1968).
