Peleș Castle

Peleș Castle served as the summer residence of the Romanian royal family and is considered one of the most beautiful castles in Romania. In 1866, Carol I was elected king of Romania, and in August of that year he visited the Sinaia Monastery and was so impressed by the beauty of the place that he decided to build a palace for himself there.

In 1872, the Crown purchased 1,300 km2 (500 sq mi) of land near the Piatra Arsă River. The estate was called the ‘Royal Estate of Sinaia’. The King ordered the construction of a royal hunting reserve and summer retreat on the property, and the foundation stone of the Peleș Palace was laid on 22 August 1873. Several auxiliary buildings were built in parallel with the palace: the guard rooms, the Economat building, the hunting lodge, and the royal power house. Peleș became the first palace in the world to be powered entirely by locally produced electricity. The palace was built between 1873 and 1914. A large number of dignitaries, writers, musicians, kings and queens were present at the palace. The most important of these was Franz Joseph I of Austria, who lived there in 1896. The palace has 160 rooms. The main tower reaches a height of 66 metres. The palace has a local power plant and the first electrified European palace.

The cost of the work on the castle, carried out between 1875 and 1914, was estimated at 16,000,000 Romanian lei in gold (about $120 million today). Between three and four hundred people worked on the construction. Queen Elisabeth of Romania, during the construction phase, wrote in her diary:

“The Italians were masons, the Romanians built terraces, the Gypsies were “vocal” (singing and dancing). The Albanians and Greeks worked in stone, the Germans and Hungarians were carpenters. The Turks were bricklayers. The engineers were Poles and the stonemasons were Czechs. The French painted, the English measured, and so it was then when you could see four languages ​​and national currencies, languages ​​and songs. They fought in all dialects and tones, a happy mixture of men, horses, cart oxen and domestic buffaloes.”