Retezat National Park

Listen for a moment. Under the wind there is water, always water. It trickles under granite boulders, drips from snow patches that last deep into summer, and runs in thin bright channels through the grass. The air smells of resin and wet stone. Up here in the Retezat Mountains, the ground moves under your boots. Loose rock clicks and shifts, and soft cushions of moss give way between the boulders. This is one of the wildest corners of the Carpathians, the long arc of mountains that curves through the middle of Romania.

You are standing in Retezat National Park, in Hunedoara County, in the Southern Carpathians. The Southern Carpathians are the high, rugged stretch of the range that Romanians sometimes call the Transylvanian Alps. The park has a special place in the country's story. It was declared in 1935 as Romania's first national park. That was a time when few countries in Europe protected wild land on purpose. Botanists and naturalists pushed for it. They worried that grazing, hunting and logging would wear these valleys down.

The name itself is worth a pause. In Romanian, the word retezat means cut off, or chopped. Look for the summit called Retezat, and you may see why. The top of the peak looks flat, almost sliced away, as if someone took a blade to the mountain. It is not the highest point in the range, though. That honour goes to Peleaga. At roughly 2,500 metres, Peleaga rises a little above its neighbour, and its summit sits in a wide circle of other sharp crests.

Now look down at the valleys rather than up at the peaks. The real character of the Retezat is shaped by ice. During the last ice ages, glaciers filled these high bowls. They scraped the granite, carried boulders downhill and dug out deep basins. When the ice melted, water filled those basins. The result is the park's best-known feature. There are dozens of glacial lakes here, often counted at around eighty. Locals call them the eyes of the mountains.

Here is the first surprise. The largest glacial lake in all of Romania is here, and so is the deepest. Bucura is the largest. It lies in a broad cirque, a bowl-shaped hollow carved by a glacier, and walls of rock rise steeply around it. Zănoaga is the deepest. On a still day its surface turns dark, almost black, because the bottom falls away so steeply. Two records, a few hours' walk apart, in the same range.

The colour of the lakes changes through the day, and the light makes all the difference. In the early morning they can be perfectly still, like mirrors of grey rock and sky. By midday the sun turns the shallow edges green and gold. In the afternoon, clouds often build over the ridges, and the water turns the colour of slate. Many lakes stay frozen well into late spring. In the shadow of the high walls, snow can last into the height of summer.

The second surprise is about the trees. As you climb, the beech and spruce forests below give way to something less common. Look for a short pine with dense bunches of soft needles, growing in twisted shapes between the boulders. This is the Swiss stone pine. It survives at the edge of where trees can grow at all. Below that line you also find mountain pine. It is a low, creeping shrub that spreads across the slopes in thick green mats. You can hardly push through it.

The Retezat is also a refuge for animals that have disappeared from much of Europe. The Carpathians hold some of the continent's largest populations of brown bears, wolves and lynx, and all three live in these forests. You are unlikely to see them, and that is a good thing. You have a better chance with the chamois. It is a nimble wild goat-antelope with short hooked horns, and it moves easily across the cliffs. Scan the high ledges with binoculars, especially early in the day.

In 1979, the park became part of UNESCO's network of biosphere reserves. These are places recognised for balancing protection with careful human use. Inside the park, one area is protected even more strictly. It is a scientific reserve, set aside for research and closed to ordinary visitors. Most travellers never notice where it begins. Respect the signs if you see them. They protect valleys that have been left almost untouched for generations.

People have lived around these mountains for a very long time. Shepherds still bring flocks up to high summer pastures. You may hear sheep bells long before you see the animals, and dogs may bark from a stone hut called a stână, a seasonal sheepfold. These dogs are working guardians, protecting the flocks from bears and wolves. Give them space, keep walking calmly, and let the shepherd call them back. It is one of the oldest rhythms in the Carpathians, and it continues today.

The experience of walking here is different from that of busier mountain parks. There are no cable cars to the summits and no paved roads to the lakes. You walk in from the edges. Common starting points include the area near the Pietrele cabin on the northern side and the long valleys that lead up from villages below. The trails climb through forest, then open onto meadows and finally onto fields of boulders. The last stretch to a lake is often a scramble across granite.

That granite is worth a closer look. Much of the high Retezat is built from hard crystalline rock, light grey and speckled. In places you can see thin pale veins running through it. Lichens paint the boulders in patches of orange, green and black. They grow very slowly, so a large patch may be older than any building in the nearest town. When the sun warms the stone, you can sit on it, and the rock holds the heat long after the air cools.

Before you move on, stop and take in what is around you. Notice how quiet it is between gusts of wind. Notice the many shades of grey in the rock, the green of the pines, and the shine of water somewhere below you. Every lake you see began as a hollow cut by ice that has long since gone. As you walk away, listen again for the water. It is still running down from the snow toward the valleys, the same way it has for thousands of years.