School of Sustainability

The bison came back to the Țarcu Mountains; the guests followed

Casa Sub Măgrin - the House under the Locust Tree - sits in Sat Bătrân, a village in Romania's Southern Carpathians, ten minutes by car from Armeniș, where walking trails lead up into the Țarcu Mountains. Mihai Miculescu opened it in 2017 as a traditional-style guesthouse, small enough that doubling its capacity means going from four guests to eight. His timing was good: the hills above the village have European bison in them, and visitors are coming to see them.

The bison had been gone a long time. Hunting and habitat loss wiped them out of these mountains more than two centuries ago, and it was only in 2014 that a reintroduction programme, run by the Rewilding Romania team with local partners, began releasing animals back into the Țarcu range. The population is now the largest free-roaming one in Romania - over 250 animals, and more than half of those were born in the wild, which is the detail that matters.

The expansion is being paid for with a 60,000-euro loan from Rewilding Europe Capital, which lends to businesses that earn their income from recovering nature, plus 15,000 euros of Mihai's own money. The work is a renovation of an existing building on the site rather than new construction, with solar panels going on to cut running costs. He expects it finished in the first half of next year.

Casa Sub Măgrin is the third accommodation business in the area to take a Rewilding Europe Capital loan, after Retezat 83 and WeWilder, and Paula Bora, Rewilding Romania's enterprise manager, is explicit that the point is the cluster, not any one property: enough beds in one place to register as a destination, then guides, food and local produce hanging off that. The guesthouse will also pay a percentage of its booking income into a new Bison Coexistence Fund, which compensates local farmers whose crops and orchards the returning animals damage.

Rewilding Europe · Read the source