Retezat

Declared in 1935 — one of the first national parks in Eastern Europe — it protects in the Romanian Carpathians one of the largest pockets of virgin forest left on the continent, with beech and fir several centuries old. Its international reputation is more recent: over the past few decades it has become a symbol of the spontaneous return of large carnivores — wolf, lynx and brown bear — to parts of Europe from which they had vanished elsewhere.