King Charles chats with Caroline Fernolend, president of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, in 2023. Photo / Getty Images
For decades, King Charles has returned regularly to Romanian villages that are lost in time.
The King’s quarters are surprisingly unroyal: no Wi-Fi, no television, but there is a 17th-century wood-burning stove, a wooden box-bed, and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II watching from the wall – kind of like mum checking to see if you’ve tidied your room.
But step outside and the setting starts to make sense.
To understand King Charles III – who last week marked the third anniversary of his ascension to the throne and this week will meet President Donald Trump – forget Buckingham Palace.
Instead, follow a 5km dirt road in Romania, through wildflower meadows and pastel-painted homes to House Number 1, at the edge of this Transylvanian hamlet, where a villager greeted recent visitors with a warning: a mother bear and her cub were spotted nearby.
This was meant less as a deterrent than Transylvanian shorthand for “maybe skip the evening jog”.
This is the rhythm Charles prefers. For a quarter of a century, Charles has returned regularly to “lost-in-time” Romanian villages, where cattle clog the streets and horse-drawn carts still trundle the roads.
Romania is “part of his life”, Count Tibor Kálnoky, a distant relative and friend of King Charles, said in an interview.
“He finds many of those things that he has been - now, I don’t want to use the word ‘preaching’, yes - but all his convictions that he is trying to convey and fight for, he finds here,” the count said. “The fact that he’s been coming for over 25 years now is speaking for itself.”
Charles has been in the global spotlight frequently this year – attending the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, visiting Pope Francis at the Vatican, meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Sandringham, opening Parliament in Canada.
If these moments show the monarch performing predictable formal duties on the world stage, Romania reveals something about the man behind the crown.
Charles likes to joke he has a “stake” in Romania – he is descended from Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
But the real pull runs deeper.
Biographers say rural Romania offers the King both a hideaway and a living laboratory for his long-standing preoccupations with land, farming and biodiversity.
Here, small-scale agriculture is a way of life and the landscape is rich with plants and animals that are lost or rare in Northern Europe.
Bears, wolves, and lynx – long vanished from Britain by hunting, deforestation, loss of habitat – still roam.
An information panel at one of his properties notes that there are 1200 higher plant species in this corner of Transylvania alone.
Another quotes the King, noting there are “over 200 butterfly species in Romania compared to only 40 in the United Kingdom”.
In a 2014 speech at the University of Bucharest, Charles warned against modernisation, noting that Britain made the “ghastly mistake” of damaging its own rural heritage and biodiversity.
Once mocked at home as an oddball prince who talked to plants, many of Charles’ views have become mainstream.
Though his carbon footprint has drawn criticism, he continues to signal his passion for what he calls – capital N – Nature.
“I have come to love Romania,” Charles said during a 2023 visit – his first trip abroad after being crowned.
“Romania has retained, in its ancient forests, pristine countryside, and through some remarkable examples of sustainable farming, an incomparable richness of Nature.”
Critics warn that his gaze can romanticise rural hardship.
Romania’s economy nearly matches the European Union average, but rural poverty, while improving, ranks among the bloc’s highest.
Traditions are fading, too, as tractors replace scythes and young people leave for cities.
Supporters counter that the King’s presence helps. The royal fuss attracts curious tourists, who then linger for the landscapes and traditions.
Charles’ various charities support those teaching rural skills, repairing monuments and financing projects like an ecological sewage system.
Caroline Fernolend, president of Mihai Eminescu Trust in Romania – a charity dedicated to conserving and regenerating rural villages – and a lifelong Viscri resident whose family has lived there since 1142, credits Charles with raising local living standards in her village.
Through his patronage of the Romanian trust, she said, he financed much of a €400,000 ($787,282) ecological wastewater treatment plant that uses gravity, reeds and organic bacteria.
“It was the first ecological sewage system in Romania,” she noted of the facility, which opened in 2011 with Charles in attendance.
“Normally, the local administrations should do this.”
Her trust had offered to gift Charles a farmhouse in 2006, but he chose to buy it for about €30,000.
Outside royal circles – and outside Romania – it is not well-known that Charles has properties here.
Among the recent visitors was Lenka Kovacova, 41, an auditor from the Czech Republic. Friends told her Charles had ties to Transylvania, so she came to see for herself. “Charles has a place here, really?” she recalled thinking.
Ciprian Mihai, 34, who works in banking in Bucharest and was visiting one of the properties, said most Romanians view the King warmly, in part because he’s not a politician and he evokes memories of the country’s own royal family, abolished under communism. Would Romanians want their own king again? “No, no, no,” Mihai said with a laugh.
Late May and early June is King Charles’ usual season here, when wildflowers spill across the hills.
He stays at his seven-bedroom guesthouse in Zalanpatak, which closes for visitors and fills with his security staff.
At other times, rooms rent for about US$200 a night, with extra for activities like bear watching, horse-cart rides or baking a traditional chimney cake.
Meals are usually communal. A recent breakfast, in an open-air shed facing a barn, was shared with a British couple who had come from Moldova.
A “wildlife diary” in the guesthouse records animal sightings. Charles spends hours walking in the wildflower meadows that on a recent day were silent but for crickets and the clatter of a stork.
On his last trip to Zalanpatak in 2023, Charles invited the whole village – about 100 people – to a picnic. Families brought bread, cheeses and plum brandy. Charles, ever the Brit, turned up with jars of Marmite, a charming or baffling move, depending on taste.
It was Kalnoky who helped Charles find the spot. The King already owned another property in Romania, in the village of Viscri, but it was in the centre of town and, as Kalnoky said, “was already becoming quite touristy, and he would certainly not have had his peace there”.
So when Charles described, in exacting detail, the cottage he wanted – a stream, access to wildflowers and a village setting but not at its centre, Kalnoky led him on a five-hour walk to a cluster of 17th-century cottages near a trickling brook.
His ancestor had built them centuries earlier to house glass blowers; the factory was long gone and the buildings derelict.
“I asked him, ‘well, would that do?’ Kalnoky recalled. “And he said, ‘That’s exactly what I have been dreaming of.’” Charles bought the property in 2008.
Charles first visited Romania in 1998, a difficult year after the death of Diana, and he has been back almost every year since. Locals expected him this year but he was diverted to Canada instead.
His Viscri property was rebranded the “King’s House,” and reopened in 2022 as a museum and exhibition space. Profits support local initiatives, from planting pear trees to a new playground.
Viscri, population under 500, is arguably Transylvania’s most famous village, home to a Unesco-listed fortified church, an HBO-featured restaurant, and, thanks to Charles, a certain royal cachet.
The King’s House, at the village centre, sells local honey and ceramics and hosts an organic garden tended by schoolchildren. More than 35,000 people visited last year.
Popularity has its downsides. House prices are up, and cars are restricted on the main dirt road where cattle are still driven daily. Some guesthouses serve milk and cheese from those herds – true table-to-farm, complete with cow bells.
Charles’ influence reaches beyond Zalanpatak and Viscri. Eugen Vaida, who runs Ecologic Transilvania, which owns Charles’ two properties in Romania, says the King’s idea of “sustainable villages” has spread to other Saxon communities and Unesco heritage sites.
It has also lured young urban professionals, people eager to restore old houses while leaving their bones intact.
“In Romania, in contrast to Britain and the Realms, he runs into little opposition and enjoys a great deal of appreciation for what he does,” biographer Catherine Mayer notes in her book, Charles: The Heart of a King.
That appreciation is visible in everyday practices that Charles admires: beans and pumpkins sown among corn to suppress weeds without chemicals; hay cut with scythes to promote biodiversity; farmhouses painted bright blue to repel insects.
Not every royal makes the same impression here.
Prince Harry once visited in 2012 and is remembered by some locals for driving motorcycles and drinking plum brandy – a livelier scene than Charles’ meadow walks.
Queen Camilla and Prince William have yet to make the trip, though Prince George already has a wildflower meadow – a patch of his grandfather’s slower world – gifted to him at birth.
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