City guide

Cluj-Napoca

Festival capital of Transylvania

Cluj-Napoca is Transylvania's unofficial capital and Romania's biggest student city: a compact old core of baroque churches and cafe-lined squares wrapped in a fast-growing tech and startup scene. It has a young, creative energy year-round, but every summer it turns into a festival capital, with UNTOLD's stadium-scale stages and Electric Castle's Banffy Castle grounds pulling in hundreds of thousands of visitors. Outside festival weeks it is calmer and walkable, closer to a laid-back university town than a big city.