The Little ParisBucharest.

The finest open-air village museum in Europe — 272 authentic buildings from across Romania, dismantled in their original villages and reassembled on the shore of Herăstrău Lake from 1936 onward. Wooden churches, farmsteads, windmills, oil presses, water mills, Transylvanian farmhouses, Maramureș gateways, Dobruja fishing huts — the complete architectural diversity of Romanian village life, arranged by region across a 15-hectare park. The buildings are furnished with original objects. On weekends, craftspeople demonstrate traditional skills in some of the workshops. It is the most direct encounter with traditional Romanian culture available in the city.

The largest and most popular park in Bucharest — 250 hectares of woodland, gardens and the 74-hectare Lake Herăstrău (officially now King Mihai I Lake), with boat rentals, lakeside restaurants, cycling paths and the relaxed summer atmosphere of a city that takes its parks seriously. The park was designed in the 1930s when Bucharest was modernising rapidly; the linden and horse-chestnut trees planted then are now mature. The specific pleasure of Herăstrău in early June: the linden blossom floating on the water, the smell, the light at 21:00 on a long Nordic-latitude evening, and the Romanian families who occupy every bench, boat and grassy slope.

Named European Museum of the Year in 1996 — a museum of Romanian rural culture housed in a 1930s neo-Romanian building, presenting peasant objects, textiles, icons, furniture and ritual artefacts with unusual honesty about both the beauty and the harshness of peasant life. The communist-era section in the basement documents the persecution of the Romanian peasantry by the collectivisation programme of the 1950s–60s, displayed without euphemism. The museum shop has the finest collection of Romanian folk textiles, ceramics and wooden objects for sale in Bucharest — authentic quality, fair prices.

Bucharest's nightlife has been called the best value in Europe for twenty years — low prices, long hours, a genuinely mixed crowd of locals and visitors, and the specific energy of a city that has been making up for lost decades. Control (Ana Ipătescu 2, the seminal Bucharest club, techno and indie rock since 2006), Expirat (Halelor 16, three floors, terrace, local DJs), Grădina Urbană (rooftop garden bar), and the terrace bars of Floreasca lake run from 22:00 to dawn without the velvet rope pretension of Western European equivalents. Beer is €2–3. The city does not start going out until 23:00.

The spiritual centre of Romanian Orthodoxy — the Patriarchal Cathedral (1658–1668) and the adjacent Palace of the Patriarchate on the hill above the Dâmbovița river, a quiet enclave of Orthodox ecclesiastical life above the communist city. The cathedral interior has the full programme of Byzantine fresco painting across its walls — saints, prophets, the Last Judgement, the Virgin enthroned — in the specific deep colours of the Romanian painting tradition. The hill itself has views over the Palace of Parliament, the communist city and the older Bucharest roofscape. The atmosphere of the hill — incense, bells, black-robed priests, flickering candles — is the sharpest contrast to the Palace of Parliament visible in the same view.

Housed in the former Royal Palace on Calea Victoriei — the residence of Romanian kings until 1947 — the national art museum has two main collections: the National Gallery (Romanian art from medieval to 20th century, including the icon tradition, Baroque, and the modern school of Nicolae Grigorescu and Stefan Luchian) and the European Gallery (El Greco, Rembrandt, Rubens, Cranach, Monet, Renoir). The medieval icons in the Gallery of Romanian Medieval Art are the most significant collection of its type in the country — gold-ground Byzantine icons from Moldavian and Wallachian monasteries, often in their original carved wooden frames.