The Red Ravine

Râpa Roșie (English: Red Ravine), is a geological park of 25 hectares, located about 3 km from Sebeş, Alba County, and was declared nature reserve since 1950. Its walls with heights between 80-100 m, have very unusual shapes: columns, towers, pyramids, all with reddish color.


Vizualizare hartă mărită
The Red Ravine detritic deposits consist of sequences of red clay, gray and red sandstone, white sandstone, loose, red marl, white calcareous marl; by erosion, subsidence and collapse processes was sculpted the richness of forms that make the Red Ravine a natural monument of rare beauty. Here are some of the largest caves in the world developed in earth, of which one of 25 m.

Here can be found also several rare plant species (Cotoneaster integarrima, Ephedra distachya, Centaurea atropurpurea, Dianthus serotinus, Cephalaria radiata, Asplenium nigrum).

Images from here.

The Roars

Situated at 1000 m altitude, the six villages of the Bucium commune, Alba County, are laying on the Nord-West slope of the Meridional Carpathians, in the South of Apuseni Mountains (in the Metaliferi Mountains). The distances between Bucium and the important towns in the area are: 70 km to Alba Iulia, 40 km to Brad, 3 km to Abrud and 8 km to Câmpeni.

At Bucium we find an amazing geological park in an exotic, full of legends landscape: Detunatele (English: The Roars). These are 200 m high basalt columns with an amazing regularity, resembling a huge natural organ; due to disintegration, blocks of the rock are rolling down accompanied by a powerful noise which explains their names.


Like the folklorist Ion Pop-Reteganul said, Detunata is "...a peak of bazalt stone, composed by huge prisms, which stand straight up, like some giant trees, one next to the other, in the Abrud Mountains, at North-West of Bucium Şasă”.


There are two Detunate, situated at 1 km away one from another. The Detunata Goală (Naked Roar, 24 hectares area) is at 1169 m altitude, was the first geological reservation (1938) and its name comes from the fact that it doesn’t have vegetation. The Detunata Flocoasă (Shaggy Roar, 5 hectares area) is at 1205 m altitude and it is covered by forests, which explains its suggestive name.