From the archive
20 Sep 2026
At the edge of the Romanian Danube Delta, near the Chilia branch before the river meets the Black Sea, water was once made to behave by pump, sluice and dyke. Ultima Frontiera became a fish farm in the 1950s, its more than 800 hectares of reedbed, lake, grassland and dune rearranged into managed ponds. The enterprise stopped around twenty years ago, and the machinery of control has been rusting while reeds, birds and animals have quietly tested the gaps.
In 2025 Rewilding Europe, backed by its Rewilding Land Facility, took long-term management rights to the site inside the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve. The point is not to freeze it as wilderness, nor to rebuild the farm. Alec Bălășescu’s team is working towards a semi-natural wetland: former ponds reconnected, barriers removed where they do the most harm, water levels allowed to move with season and river rather than production targets.
The place refuses to let that work become innocent. Nearby stood Periprava, a forced-labour colony among the harshest in Romania’s communist detention system, where political prisoners built embankments, reclaimed ground and cut reeds. The camp ran from 1958 to 1963 under commander Ion Ficior; over those five years it cost the lives of more than 100 prisoners. Rewilding Romania is working with the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile so the derelict buildings are neither erased nor prettified. Owls and bats are already using them; vegetation is taking the walls back by increments.
A hydrological study by Dutch consultancy Bureau Stroming now gives the team a working map of how water enters, stalls and leaves. Horses and locally owned cattle already graze parts of the site, keeping open ground in use rather than abandoning it to scrub. If the reconnection holds, Dalmatian pelicans, terns, fish and the ordinary plants of wet places get room first; people get a delta that remembers what was done to it while becoming less broken.
If you hold wet ground, map where water wants to go before spending: walk it after rain, flag every sluice and collapsed culvert, then open the lowest barrier first and watch one winter. A hand level, notebook and spade cost little; the patient season is the budget.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source