From the archive
18 Sep 2026
Alec Bălășescu manages a place that most maps forgot. Ultima Frontiera sits beside the Chilia branch of the Danube, close to the Black Sea, and its name - last frontier - is literal. Eight hundred hectares of reedbeds, lakes, grassland and dunes, inside the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, where white-tailed eagles and Dalmatian pelicans still turn up and horses wander loose. It looks wild. It isn't.
In the 1950s the wetland was drained and penned into a fish farm, its water moved by dykes, sluices and pumps. Some of those embankments were built by political prisoners. The nearby Periprava labour colony was among the harshest camps in Romania's communist system, and between 1958 and 1963, under a commander named Ion Ficior, more than a hundred men died there reclaiming land and cutting reeds. The fish farm itself gave up about twenty years ago, the pumps rusted, and the water began quietly finding its own way back.
In 2025, with backing from the Rewilding Land Facility, Rewilding Europe took on long-term management of the site. Work is already under way - buildings renovated, waste cleared, infrastructure repaired - while a hydrological study by Dutch consultancy Bureau Stroming, completed in 2026, proposes reconnecting the former fish ponds, removing barriers and improving connectivity with the Danube. The aim is a semi-natural system with dynamic water levels, better for fish, Dalmatian pelicans and terns. Locally owned cattle already graze alongside the horses.
The derelict prison buildings are not being demolished. Vegetation is closing over them, and owls and bats have moved into the ruins. Rewilding Romania is working with the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile to keep the history legible - remembrance and reedbed in the same place, on the argument that a healed landscape that forgets what happened on it has only half healed.
Before touching a drained wetland, pay for a hydrological study and wait for it - one wet season and one dry, to see where the water wants to go. And walk the site with the oldest residents you can find before clearing a single building; the history goes with the rubble.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source