Munții Apuseni

Apuseni Mountains Nature Park was declared in 1990 in western Romania, in the Western Carpathians, across the counties of Alba, Bihor and Cluj, and protects some 760 km². Its designation is that of a nature park, not a national park, which reflects the presence of population and traditional uses within its boundaries.

It is the country's largest karst complex. More than one thousand five hundred caves have been catalogued beneath the massif, and at the surface the landscape is full of dolines, ponors where rivers sink underground, resurgences, gorges and natural bridges. Among its cavities, the Scărișoara cave stands out, which holds one of the largest underground glaciers in the world, with a block of ice thousands of years old that preserves a climate archive of scientific value, and Cetățile Ponorului, a complex of giant dolines and cave portals regarded as the most spectacular karst feature in the Apuseni.

The park is also a living cultural landscape: it is the territory of the Moți, mountain communities who have inhabited these valleys for centuries with an economy based on timber, livestock and craft work, and whose hamlets scattered across the slopes form part of the protected area. The beech and fir forests that cover the massif hold the complete Carpathian fauna, with brown bear, wolf and lynx, and the caves host important bat colonies.