Munții Măcinului

Măcin Mountains National Park was declared in 2003 in Tulcea county, in north-western Dobrogea, between the Danube to the north and west and the Casimcea plateau to the south, and protects some 111 km². Seen from the river it looks like a simple line of hills, but it is a mountain range in its own right.

They are the oldest mountains in Romania. They formed in the second half of the Palaeozoic, during the Carboniferous and the Permian, in the Hercynian orogeny, between 300 and 400 million years ago, compared with barely 65 million for the Carpathians. It is reckoned that they once reached three thousand metres and formed part of a massif that ran across Europe from west to east, of which only traces remain in Dobrogea, the Vosges and the mountains of Scotland and Brittany. Today their summit, Țuțuiatu or Greci, does not reach 470 metres: erosion, sharpened by the strong temperature contrast, has worn the granite down to steep, ruin-like slopes.

Its botanical value is as singular as its geology. It is the only national park in Romania that protects significant areas of Pontic-Balkan steppe, a vegetation type very rare on a European scale, and one of the main arguments for its creation was the extremely high number of threatened plant species it holds, many of them present in Romania only in Dobrogea and unprotected in any other reserve. It is the most arid mountain area in the country, with very hot summers, long dry autumns and cold winters with little snow. Some twelve kilometres from Luncavița lies the Valea Fagilor Scientific Reserve, a Tertiary relict of the ancient forests that once covered Dobrogea.