Turreted stone and timber villas line a forested hillside below Peleș Castle, with a Belle Epoque casino and monastery at the town's centre.
What Sinaia looks like
climbs the hillside past a row of Belle Epoque villas, their ground floors in stone and their upper storeys in half timbering or wood shingle, a turret or a spire breaking the roofline every few doors. At number 28, dates from 1875, with stone pillars and a gabled porch behind an iron picket fence. It now houses the town museum.
Side streets drop steeply off the boulevard between wooden picket fences and stone gateposts, pine forest rising directly behind the rooftops. A few streets over on Strada Mihail Kogălniceanu, has dark timber balconies and steep gables in the German Renaissance style. Most villas stand freshly painted with flower boxes on their balconies, though a handful sit boarded up, their turret roofs rusted and balustrades broken.
The compound sits at the centre of town, its older stone church dating from 1695 and its larger church rising in three green roofed towers above walls banded in red brick, white stone and green enamel tile. The casino, a cream stone Neo Romanian building from 1912 to 1913 in Dimitrie Ghica Park, now operates as a conference centre.
The town's own railway station, , is built of rough stone blocks with an arcaded porch on both sides. It is reserved for state occasions, beside the working public station below it. Above the rooftops at the edge of town, 's turrets and half timbered galleries rise out of the pine forest.
Shot in Sinaia
Peleș Castle's exterior has played a fictional royal residence for three different productions, at the forested edge of town. Netflix's A Christmas Prince trilogy and Hallmark's Royal Matchmaker both used it as a storybook palace, and The Brothers Bloom destroyed it on screen as a New Jersey mansion in 2008. Netflix's Wednesday used the town's own Gara Regală, the 1939 ceremonial railway station, as Burlington station in its first season.
A Christmas Prince, 2017 to 2019
Peleș Castle
Played the royal palace of Aldovia, the fictional kingdom of Aldovia, present day
Netflix's A Christmas Prince trilogy used the castle's entrance, courtyard and garden as the exterior of the fictional kingdom of Aldovia's royal palace. Hallmark's Royal Matchmaker shot the same exterior as the kingdom of Voldavia in 2018. The Brothers Bloom filmed it as a New Jersey mansion in 2008, destroyed within that film's plot.
What Sinaia can double for
Kościeliska Street in Zakopane, Poland
Kościeliska Street has the same scale of turreted timber and stone villas as Sinaia's own boulevard, including Villa Koliba, built in the 1890s in the local carved wood Zakopane style. The carved wooden fretwork and steeper Tatra peaks behind the roofline are more pronounced than Sinaia's, so a tight street level frame holds the comparison better than a wide one. Try searching turreted timber villas now.
Ludwigstraße in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
Partenkirchen's old town runs along Ludwigstrasse, a cobblestoned street of alpine houses below forested slopes, a similar resort town scale to Sinaia's own hillside streets. The frescoed facades here are a Bavarian detail Sinaia's villas do not share, so keep the painted walls out of a frame meant to pass for Romania. Try searching cobblestoned alpine street now.
Tuxedo Park in Tuxedo Park, New York
Tuxedo Park's 1880s cottages are turreted, with steep gables in the Queen Anne style, set among the forested Ramapo Mountains much as Sinaia's villas sit against the Bucegi foothills. The shingle siding reads differently from Sinaia's stone and half timbered fronts in a close shot, so this works best for a wide establishing frame of roofline against forest. Try searching turreted mountain cottages now.
