Mehedinți Plateau: Culture, People, and Nature
The Mehedinți Plateau in southwestern Romania stands out through a harmonious blend of traditional culture and nature.
Daniel Onea, 08.10.2026, 14:00
The Mehedinți Plateau in southwestern Romania stands out through a harmonious blend of traditional culture and nature. To assess and promote this heritage, the Sinaptica Association, the ASTRA Museum, and the commune of Izverna in Mehedinți County (southwestern Romania) are implementing the ‘Culture, People, and Nature’ project. This initiative, co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund, uses the concept of “cultural landscape” a first for Romania.
Through volunteer camps, the project has attracted young people from abroad seeking an authentic experience. The goal is to preserve traditions and promote sustainable tourism that exists in harmony with nature. Ionică Pârvu, coordinator of the “Culture, People, and Nature” project on behalf of the Sinaptica Association, outlines the initiative’s objectives and the region’s specificity: “Our partners include the ASTRA National Museum Complex in Sibiu and the commune of Izverna. The project is co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. We have previously conducted projects focused on the cultural heritage of Mehedinți. This time, we decided to address a theme that is new to Romania, namely the cultural landscape. The project is nearing completion, and its activities have focused on the Mehedinți Plateau. This area boasts extraordinary wealth in terms of traditional culture. It features a blend of nature and human activity spanning history, elements that make the region truly special. The area is not defined by sweeping, expansive vistas, as the plateau is only a few hundred meters high. Instead, the region is unique because its traditional culture has not yet suffered the kind of degradation observed in Maramureș or many parts of Transylvania, regions otherwise renowned for their cultural value.”
To conduct fieldwork, the project team organized two volunteer camps in the commune of Izverna. Foreign citizens interested in Romania’s traditional heritage also took part in these activities. The first camp was attended by a young man from France and an expert from Lithuania, while the second edition saw the participation of a young urban planner from China who is studying in Turin, Italy. Together with the volunteers, the specialists analyzed the area’s traditional structures, as explained by project coordinator Ionică Pârvu: “We identified the fundamental elements that distinguish the Mehedinți Plateau. The first are the manor houses scattered outside the villages. Another element is the ‘palanca’. This is an animal shelter, ancient in both structure and construction method, whose origins can be traced back to prehistory. Also significant is the way the plateau’s gardens are laid out, those for vegetables, corn, and grapevines. All these form a cultural landscape. From the perspective of the UNESCO classification, this area is an organically evolved cultural landscape. No one ever planned for the place to look a certain way; the landscape took shape through the adaptation of human activity to the surrounding environment, in terms of architecture and the materials used throughout history, up until about 50 or 60 years ago.”
Some of these ‘conace’ – manor houses or traditional rural homesteads are still in use today. In the Mehedinți Plateau, the ’conac’ serves as a temporary dwelling, used primarily during the summer, around which locals would raise their livestock. While the main herd was taken to mountain pastures, families kept one or two cows and a few sheep near the homestead to provide milk and cheese for daily consumption. There, they also tended to a garden, an orchard, or a vineyard. Next Ionică Pârvu will give us details on the architecture of these structures: TRACK: “We discovered dozens of such homesteads there. They range from simple structures with just two small rooms to large buildings spanning three levels, adapted to the terrain’s layout. Instead of leveling the ground, the locals built the structures in tiers along the hillside. There are still people, mostly the elderly, who stay there during the summer. They use an open hearth, an ancient system for both heating and cooking. The oldest structure we could identify visually, without conducting in-depth testing, is approximately 200 years old. The building was inhabited continuously from its inception until just five, six, or at most ten years ago. People lived exactly like that, without even having electricity brought to the site. There are still locals, both old and not-so-old, who carry their autumn harvest in a cart pulled by cows. They no longer have oxen, so the cows pull the cart.”
The traditional way of life and the way locals have shaped the landscape over generations make the Mehedinți Plateau a suitable destination for leisurely hikes. Ionică Pârvu, coordinator of the ‘Culture, People, and Nature’ project, describes the experience of tourists covering the region’s trails: “From this perspective, we are talking about a cultural landscape that blends human activity with mountain peaks, forest groves, and ‘cucuie’, a local term for higher hills. Terracing not only enabled agriculture but also served to hold back flash floods. This interplay between nature and people creates a cultural landscape of exceptional beauty and uniqueness, one best experienced on foot. There is no need for paved roads; the trails require no more than five or six hours of walking. We aren’t talking about grueling mountain climbs or routes spanning tens of kilometers. You can start from one village, reach another, and complete a short, six-kilometer loop. Whichever path you take, you will eventually reach a ‘cucui’, that hill rising above the rest, offering a magnificent panoramic view. A leisurely four-hour walk gives you time to stop and enjoy some fruit in the summer, take photographs, or simply sit on the grass and listen to the wind in the profound quiet. In those four hours, you can travel from the lowlands or river meadows up a hillside, finding yourself at an elevation comparable to the Parâng Mountains, with the Retezat Mountain range visible in the distance, right at eye level.”
Through the ‘Culture, People, and Nature’ project, the Mehedinți Plateau is showcased as a model of coexistence between humans and the environment. Preserving seasonal homesteads, traditional agricultural techniques, and the paths connecting villages offers the Izverna community the opportunity to develop sustainable tourism rooted in nature and the local cultural identity. (LS)
