Bran Castle

Bram Stoker never wrote about this castle, and there is no evidence he had ever heard of it.

Bran Castle stands 25 kilometres southwest of Brașov, on the Transylvanian side of the historical border with Wallachia, on road DN73. Saxons built it in 1377, having been granted the privilege by Louis I of Hungary, and it is a national monument and landmark of Transylvania.

Outside Romania it is marketed as Dracula's Castle and presented as the home of Stoker's title character. Radio Free Europe put the question in a 2006 headline that gets straight to it: did Dracula ever set foot in Dracula's Castle? The answer is layered. There is no evidence Stoker knew anything about this building. Its associations with Vlad the Impaler, voivode of Wallachia, are only tangential, and rest largely on his byname Drăculea resembling the name Stoker chose. And Stoker's own description of a crumbling fictional castle bears no resemblance to Bran.

So what is it, if not that? It is a genuine 14th-century Saxon fortress in a spectacular position, and it is now a museum of the art and furniture collected by Queen Marie of Romania, which is a considerably more interesting thing to walk through than a film set. You can see the interior on your own or take a guided tour.

At the bottom of the hill there is a small open-air museum of traditional Romanian peasant buildings brought in from the Bran region: cottages, barns, water-driven machinery. That part is easy to skip and worth not skipping.

Go for the castle, and for the century that built it. The vampire is a marketing decision made a long way from here, and the place is better than the story attached to it.