Porțile de Fier

Iron Gates Nature Park was declared in 2000 in south-western Romania, along the left bank of the Danube, and protects some 1,156 km². Its axis is the gorge the river has cut between the southern Carpathians and the Serbian Balkan mountains, regarded as the longest and deepest in Europe, running some 130 kilometres with stretches where the channel narrows to barely two hundred metres between walls several hundred high.

The gorge has been for millennia an obligatory passage between central Europe and the Black Sea, and it preserves an exceptional density of heritage: the Tabula Traiana, a second-century Roman inscription commemorating the road cut into the rock for the Dacian campaigns, and facing it, on the Romanian bank, the colossal sculpture of Decebalus carved into the cliff in the late twentieth century, the largest in Europe. Upstream lay the Mesolithic site of Lepenski Vir, moved before the flooding.

Because the present landscape is not the original one: the building of the Iron Gates I and II hydroelectric dams, between 1964 and 1984, raised the river level by tens of metres, flooded inhabited islands such as Ada Kaleh, with its centuries-old Turkish community, and completely transformed the regime of the Danube, blocking in addition the migration of the sturgeon that came up from the Black Sea. The park today protects the thermophilous forests of the slopes, with sub-Mediterranean species, the limestone outcrops and a cliff-dwelling and water birdlife of interest.