“We are very proud of our homes. We had the chance to buy after the revolution in 1989, and everyone did. According to recent figures Romania is now first in the world for private home ownership – 96 per cent of people own their own properties,” Sergiu Pol, a fellow traveller from Brasov, told me when I arrived soon after in the village of Murighiol. I was there to board a riverboat to the Green Village Resort in the coastal town of Sfântu Gheorghe (not to be confused with the city of Sfântu Gheorghe in central Romania).
At the heart of the 580,000-hectare Danube Delta, where Europe’s second longest river flows into the Black Sea, Sfântu Gheorghe can only be reached from the water, or by hiking some 65 miles across swamps. Though Romanians come, very few foreign tourists do – I was the only non-native passenger on the small boat, just big enough for 10 people plus luggage. White-tailed eagles and shaggy Dalmatian pelicans soared above as herds of long-horned cattle wallowed like hippos in the bottle-green waters.
Damp with spray, we disembarked on a narrow iron jetty surrounded by the blackened hulls of traditional canoe-like fishing boats, many abandoned since the resort became part of the Danube Biosphere Reserve. “We’ve fished sustainably here since the Middle Ages, but now they only grant a few fishing licences a year – Europe has decimated the local way of life,” receptionist Mihai muttered as he led me to my suite, crowned with a thatched roof and a nest of chattering storks.