From the archive
17 Sep 2026
Beside the Chilia branch of the Danube, a short way from the Black Sea, sits a patch of Romania called Ultima Frontiera - more than eight hundred hectares of reedbed, lake, grassland and dune. For the second half of the twentieth century it was a fish farm, its water held and pushed around by dykes, sluices and pumps. The farm gave up roughly twenty years ago, much of that infrastructure has fallen into disrepair since, and the wetland has been quietly reclaiming the pens on its own.
In 2025 Rewilding Europe, backed by its Rewilding Land Facility, took on long-term management rights to the site. The team, led by Alec Bălășescu, began not with bulldozers but with a question: how does water actually move through this place? A Dutch consultancy, Bureau Stroming, spent the first stretch of the project on a hydrological study, finished in 2026, which proposes reconnecting the old fish ponds, taking out barriers and opening better passage to the river. The stated aim is not a pristine wetland but a semi-natural one - livelier water levels, better conditions for fish, aquatic plants and birds.
The site carries a heavier inheritance than broken sluices. The neighbouring Periprava colony was among the most brutal camps in Romania's communist detention system. Political prisoners built the embankments, reclaimed the land and cut the reeds; more than a hundred died there between 1958 and 1963 under the commander Ion Ficior. Rather than flatten the remains, the rewilding team is working with the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile to keep that history visible. The derelict prison buildings are being colonised in the meantime by vegetation, owls and bats.
Some of the work has already started: buildings renovated, rubbish carted away, infrastructure patched. Horses and cattle belonging to local owners graze loose across parts of the site, doing the job wild herds once did. White-tailed eagles and Dalmatian pelicans are already present, and the restored water levels are intended to give the pelicans, and the terns, somewhere new to breed. Bălășescu talks about making it a showcase for the delta, but the truer measure will be whether the water, given its openings, does the rest.
Before touching a single dyke or sluice on a drained wetland, pay for the water to be understood first: a proper hydrological survey that maps where flow is blocked and where reconnection is possible. On a large site that means a consultancy study costing in the tens of thousands of euros; on a small one it can be a season of walking the ditches after rain with someone who remembers how the land used to drain.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source