Agroturism în România

Most of us live in big, crowded cities. Every day life is very stressful especially when you live in a big city, polluted, full of cars and angry people, doing endless lines to buy some bread. In order to resist to this kind of life we have to “change the batteries”, to recover, and I mean, to take a vacation.

But when it comes to vacations, what destination do we choose. It’s a difficult job so often we let others decide for us: Expensive, exotic destinations that can empty our pockets in no time. We love to go abroad for a vacation, when we don’t even know our own country that can offer much more at a good price. The top destinations for 2006, experts say are Greece, Spain, Turkey, Malta and Egypt, local destinations being much neglected because of the high prices and bad services.

The problem is that most of us haven’t tried agro turism. We didn’t, we let the foreigners do that. Agro tourism means spending our vacations at a nice, quiet countryside, where people care about you , food is delicious and very natural, the air is clean and usually you never get bored because the hosts organize different activities, like visiting the surroundings, riding horses and other things.

This is the map of the touristic zones:

In order to let people know more about rural tourism we will present some of these regions.

MARAMURES

Placed in the northern part of Romania, the county of Maramures is spread over a surface totalizing 160 km from west to east and about 60 km from north to south. The surface of the county is 6.125 sq.km and population exceeds 500 000inhabitants.

The county is in the vicinity of Ukraine in its northern part, of Suceava County in its eastern part and of Satu Mare in its western part. The counties of Cluj, Salaj and Bistrita Nasaud are bordering the southern part of the county.

Maramures has a complex landscape, mostly of mountainous type. The peaks of Rodna, Maramures, Tibles, Gutai are guarding the horizon gorgeously.

The climate is of moderate continental type, rains being quite rich during the year. The rivers of Maramures are clean and quick, specific to the mountainous areas, many of them being crowded with fish. We may find here vegetation that is specific to the Central European area, where beech and coniferous forests are predominant. As far as fauna is concerned, a large variety of animals are living in the forests: stags, wild boars, bears, rabbits, etc. The county has a large number of trout farms, such as in the following villages: Firiza, Blidari, Sapanta, etc.

Maramures may be also proud by its rich underground resources (gold, silver, copper, lead). From the touristic point of view, Maramures has four distinct areas to be seen, if considered from the landscape’s beautiful appearance and also from the cultural and ethnographic points of view that make Maramures a very special area when compared to other parts of the country. The four above - mentioned areas are as follows: Country of Maramures, Country of Lapus, Country of Chioar and Baia Mare.

Maramures County is an area that preserves the ancient traditions almost intact and the preservation of the folk costumes and folk art are kept like no other part of Romania. Therefore, the primordial element of the tourism in Maramures is the village life. The wooden churches and gates sculptured in wood are real masterpieces of folk art. Almost each village from Maramures has such extraordinary beauties to be seen.