From the archive
16 Sep 2026
The pumps stopped roughly twenty years ago, and since then the water at Ultima Frontiera has been finding its own way back. Reedbeds have spread across the old fish ponds. Owls and bats have moved into buildings that no one has bothered to demolish. The site sits beside the Chilia branch of the Danube, close to the Black Sea, and its 800 hectares of wetlands, lakes, grassland and dunes already hold white-tailed eagles, Dalmatian pelicans, golden jackals and free-roaming horses.
None of this was untouched wilderness waiting to be saved. In the 1950s the area was cut up with dykes, sluices and pumps to make a fish farm, and the labour that raised embankments and reclaimed land across this part of the delta was forced. The Periprava labour colony nearby was among the harshest in communist Romania; under commander Ion Ficior, more than a hundred prisoners died between 1958 and 1963, working on land reclamation and reed harvesting. When the farm folded, the machinery and earthworks were simply left to rust.
In 2025, with backing from the Rewilding Land Facility, Rewilding Europe took on long-term management rights. Alec Bălășescu, who leads the Danube Delta rewilding team, runs the site. Before touching a single sluice, the team commissioned Dutch consultancy Bureau Stroming to study how water actually moves through the place. That work, finished in 2026, proposes reconnecting the old ponds, stripping out barriers and opening better passage to the river itself. What has happened so far is quieter: roofs patched, rubbish carted away, fences and gates made sound, plans drawn on paper.
The plan is not to recreate some pre-human wetland. The aim is a semi-natural system: water levels that rise and fall more freely, grazing from horses and locally owned cattle already wandering the site, new breeding ground for pelicans and terns. The derelict structures are being kept standing rather than erased, even as vegetation closes over them. Working with Romania's Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, the team intends the prison remains to stay visible, so that what happened here is remembered alongside what is being restored.
Before breaching any dyke or reconnecting ponds, find out where the water actually wants to go. A consultancy hydrological study takes about a year; on a small site you can do a rough version yourself with one wet season, a notebook and a stick, marking where water sits after each flood.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source