Why now
Good time in May: 20°C days, 14 rainy days.
Late spring and early autumn give the best combination of open passes, walkable towns and harvest food; the Transfăgărășan road opens only from summer to autumn. The town's theatre festival fills every room for ten days in early summer, and the Christmas market fills the Large Square in December.
Best months here: June, August, September. May is not one of them — the label above measures the month against a fixed bar, not against the rest of the year here. Daytime highs, sea temperature and rainy days from three years of Open-Meteo reanalysis; a rainy day is one with at least 1 mm of rain, which is the WMO threshold and not the same as "it drizzled".
The place
Sibiu is a Saxon town in Transylvania whose roofs have eyes, with three linked squares, a Lutheran cathedral and a lower town of pastel houses, and the Făgăraș mountains twenty minutes to the south. It suits people who like a well-kept town as a base for villages, fortified churches and mountain roads.
What you can do
- 01Walk the Large Square, the Small Square and the Bridge of Lies, then climb the Council Tower.
- 02See the Brukenthal Museum's Flemish and German paintings in the baron's palace on the square.
- 03Drive the Transfăgărășan to Bâlea Lake when it is open, going early to beat the coaches.
- 04Eat ciorbă de burtă, sarmale and papanași in a courtyard restaurant in the lower town.
- 05Spend a day in the Mărginimea Sibiului villages, with sheep cheese from Rășinari or Sibiel.
Where to stay · neighbourhoods
The upper town for a first visit, the lower town for value; for mountain villages, a pension in Rășinari or Sibiel with dinner included.
Unusual things
- ◦The ASTRA open-air museum in the Dumbrava forest, a large collection of Romanian village houses, mills and churches around a lake.
- ◦The fortified church of Cisnădie, a Saxon citadel-church with a climbable tower on the square.
- ◦Păltiniș, Romania's oldest ski resort at 1,400 metres, thirty minutes up a forest road, with summer trails.
Day trips
Flight options
Routes come from OpenFlights (historical) and a 2026 route reference compiled from public timetables. Durations are the published schedule where we have it, otherwise a block-time model fitted on measured nonstop flights. Verify schedules with the airline before booking.
Entry requirements · IT passport
Source: passport-index-data, March 2026 (coarse indicator), covering 258 of our 268 destinations for each of 199 passports. Always confirm with the destination's official site.
Airports
Distances are centre to airport derived · nonstop counts are our route reference for 2026, not every flight that exists.
Local transport
- Airport to city
- Bus 11, 20 min, RON 2.50
- Car needed?
- Recommended for most of what is worth seeing
- Getting around
- The old town is walked, and taxis are cheap; a car is the way to reach the villages and the Transfăgărășan. Sibiu's airport is 15 minutes away, and the train to Brașov or Cluj takes three to four hours.
- Clock
- 1 hour ahead of Rome (Europe/Bucharest) derived
- Daylight
- 14.9 hours of daylight in May · sunrise 05:53, sunset 20:46 derived
- Currency
- RON
Good to know
Brown bears are common in the Făgăraș and near Bâlea Lake, so do not feed them from the road and keep to marked trails.
Alternatives at a similar price
Whole trip per person for 4 days from Rome in May, then the flight time; estimates, like the total above.
Casablanca
Fez
Chișinău
Marrakech
Skopje
Rhodes