Although there are more than two months left until the winter holidays, several guesthouses in Straja, the most popular mountain resort in western Romania, have launched offers for tourists. In recent winters, although poor in snow, in Straja tourists could use the slopes.
Straja resort in winter. Photo: Daniel Guță. TRUTH
Several guesthouses in Straja, the most popular mountain resort in western Romania, have recently launched offers for holidaymakers.
Located 1,400 – 1,600 meters below the Straja peak in the Vâlcan Mountains, the Straja mountain resort in Hunedoara is among the most sought-after leisure spots in winter, being particularly attractive for its wide and accessible ski slopes in winter, maintained with artificial snow when rainfall is not sufficient for their development.
New Year’s holiday with 2,500 lei at Straja
The first offers to celebrate the New Year holidays in Straja were launched by the administrators of the guesthouses.
Some offer tourist packages worth 2,500 lei per person, which include four nights’ accommodation between December 29, 2024 and January 2, 2025, with full board, house drinks, festive New Year’s meal (video: how Straja looks like in winter).
However, interested tourists must pay an advance of 50 percent of the package price. During the same period, another guesthouse in Straja offers rooms at the price of 800 lei per person, for groups of 16 people.
Four nights of accommodation during the Christmas period (December 22, 2024 – December 26, 2024) with house drinks and the festive menu can be booked at the price of 1,700 lei per person, with a 50 percent advance payment.
Also during the Christmas period, for three nights of accommodation in another guesthouse in Straja, without a festive meal, groups of tourists are invited to reserve rooms at the price of 450 lei per person. Another villa in Straja offers, for 1,400 lei per person, a tourist package that includes three nights’ accommodation, half board (breakfast and lunch) and festive Christmas meal.
Straja, popular for its ski slopes
Located at the foot of the Retezat, Parâng – Șureanu and Vâlcan Mountains, the Jiului Valley in Hunedoara has been known since the 19th century for the rich coal resources discovered here and intensively exploited in the last century and a half.
But with the development of mining towns, mountain tourism has become one of the favorite activities of many locals and guests of the coal country. The first mountain huts were built here as early as the 19th century. They served as customs points, shelters for travelers, shepherds, foresters and military (border guards and gendarmes).
In the 1930s, the first cabins for tourists were built in Retezat, Parâng and Vâlcan, and at the beginning of the 1970s, with the development of mountain trails and the construction of forest roads, tourists who took the trails in the mountains of Parâng, Vâlcan and The Little Retezat around the Ji Valley, they found places to rest in several refuges and cabins specially designed for them.
After 1990, the old leisure areas from Straja, Pasul Vâlcan and from Parâng were transformed into mountain resorts, with dozens of cabins and guesthouses, with ski slopes, gondolas, chairlifts and new roads, which took the place of difficult-to-access forest roads .
The Straja mountain resort, established in the early 2000s, has benefited from the largest investments in tourism and infrastructure among the recreational areas in the Jiului Valley. It currently includes more than 200 cabins and guesthouses and slopes with a total length of more than 20 kilometers. Tourists also find here a hermitage built in the early 2000s, known for the over 50-meter tunnel used as an access gate to the courtyard, decorated with the icons of the saints from the Orthodox Calendar.
The new roads to the resorts, built since the 2000s
The road that goes up from Lupeni to Straja is about eight kilometers long and is known as the “Way of the Cross”, after the religious procession that takes place on it, annually, on the Good Friday before Easter.
“People carry a wooden cross, weighing more than 100 kilograms, on the route of more than 10 kilometers that goes up from the church in the center of Lupeni municipality, to the hermitage and the Cross of Heroes in Straja. 14 religious monuments were placed on the route, as stopping places for pilgrims who climb the Way of the Cross”show the representatives of the station.
On the other side of Vârful Straja (1868 meters), which gives the resort its name, is Pasul Vâlcan – a tourist area accessible by an eight-kilometer mountain road that climbs from the municipality of Vulcan, up to over 1,600 meters, but also by gondola .
Parâng mountain resort (video), established at the beginning of the 70s and equipped since then with a chair lift, is accessible from Petroșani and Petrila, on the road modernized in recent years, on its last kilometers. The last section of the road, 800 meters long, starts from the center of the resort at an altitude of 1,600 meters and climbs, among cabins and guesthouses, to an altitude of 1,740 meters.
