More than 150 kilometres in length the Transfagarasan Highway is Romania’s most spectacular and best known road, and a very popular tourist attraction. Fully open only from June to October, the road’s highest point is at 2042 metres: the tunnel which links the northern and southern sides at Lake Balea.

The Transfagarasan 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.

A far more likely explanation for the construction of the road was the simple fact that the mountains were there, and that the road across the very top would serve as a proud example of just what socialist Romania - with Ceausescu as its leader - could achieve as a status symbol with little regard for cost or usefulness.