This creepy Gothic castle, with its drawbridge over a rushing river, leaps from all your favourite horror films but seems incongruously close to the industrialised, scarified buildings around it. And while it might lack crags and forests swirling round it, on the frightometer it beats Bran Castle with its eyes shut.
Play 'shoot the cabbage' (five arrows for 10 lei) with a bow and arrow, wander through the church-high vaulted darkness of the largely unrestored downstairs chambers and past a hunter's gallery of lynx, wolf, boar and bear pelts. In the upstairs banquet hall you can live out your inner Monty Python Holy Grail fantasy dressed as a maiden or knight in its fancy-dress wardrobe (5 lei for half an hour).
The fantastical monument stands as a symbol of Hungarian rule. The fairy-tale castle walls, believed to be built on old Roman fortifications, were hewn out of 30m of solid rock by Turkish prisoners. Eventually Jules Verne included the castle in his Around the World in 80 Days itinerary in 1873. The castle was fully restored in 2009.
From the bus or train station, the castle is about 1.5km southwest, but it's easier to take the bus to the old centre (2 lei) then walk the short distance from there.
