Bran Castle (Dracula's Castle)

Perched on a rocky outcrop between Wallachia and Transylvania, Bran Castle was built by Saxon guildsmen of Brașov between 1377 and 1388 to guard a mountain trade route, and its silhouette became world-famous only after Bram Stoker described a castle matching its profile in his 1897 novel "Dracula," despite Stoker never having visited Romania or explicitly naming Bran in the text. The connection to Vlad III, "the Impaler," whose brutal 15th-century reign inspired Stoker's count, is historically thin — Vlad likely passed near the castle at most — but the pairing stuck, and the fortress is now marketed worldwide as "Dracula's Castle." Guides tell of cold drafts moving through the narrow stone stairwells and of a secret passage connecting two floors that was hidden behind a fireplace, only rediscovered decades after the castle became a museum in the 1950s. Local Romanian folklore around vampiric strigoi predates Stoker by centuries.