Ialomița

A trip to Ialomița takes you into the heart of the Bărăgan, the great grain steppe of southeastern Romania. Travelers here find wide, flat horizons, salt lakes with healing mud, and one of the country's most famous bridges on the Danube.

Landscape and Location

Ialomița County lies east of Bucharest and follows the course of the Ialomița River to its confluence with the Danube. To the east, the Borcea branch of the Danube, with its islands and oxbow lakes, forms the boundary; elsewhere the plain dominates, with fields of wheat, corn, and sunflowers. The steppe's salt lakes are characteristic, above all Lake Amara and Lake Fundata. Summers are hot and dry, winters windy – the Crivăț, an icy east wind, sweeps across the flat land.

Slobozia, Amara, and Fetești

The county seat, Slobozia, sits on the banks of the Ialomița and is a quiet administrative city with a cathedral, a county museum, and a small open-air ethnographic area. On the edge of town, a replica of the Eiffel Tower, part of a hotel complex, regularly astonishes passersby. Just a few kilometers to the north lies Amara, the county's most important spa town. The salty lake and its sapropel mud have been used for more than a hundred years to treat rheumatism and skin conditions, and spa hotels and a beach line the lake. At Fetești begins the railway bridge over the Danube to Cernavodă, completed by the engineer Anghel Saligny in 1895 – at the time one of the longest bridges in Europe, today a technical monument beside the modern highway bridges of the A2. Urziceni to the west is a hub on the road toward Moldova.

Food, Getting There, and Best Time to Visit

The cuisine is rustic: grilled mutton and pork, ciorbă soups, Danube fish from the Borcea area, and fresh vegetables. The best time for a spa stay is from May to September, when the lake is warm. Slobozia lies about 125 kilometers (78 miles) east of Bucharest; the A2 highway toward Constanța runs through the south of the county, and the railway connects Fetești with Bucharest and the Black Sea. If you're headed to the coast, Amara makes a good place to break your journey.