The column wall
The quarry face exposing the whole rank.
Xulescu g — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Xulescu g — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Xulescu g — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Xulescu g — CC BY-SA 4.0
The road itself is among the finest in Transylvania, and there are four stops on it. **Rupea Citadel** on its basalt rock. **Viscri**, a Saxon village with a World Heritage fortified church and painted houses, well known because King Charles III bought a house in it. The **Racoș columns** with their two quarry lakes. And **Sighișoara** itself, the only still-inhabited medieval citadel left in Eastern Europe. The whole distance is about a hundred and twenty kilometres, and it needs a full day by car to take in all four.
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By the village of Racoș north of Brașov stands a wall of **hexagonal basalt columns** as regular as if they had been carved by hand, exposed in the side of an old quarry to a height of tens of metres. The shape is not manufactured. When basalt lava cools slowly and evenly it contracts and cracks vertically in a hexagonal pattern — the same phenomenon that produced the Giant's Causeway in Ireland and Fingal's Cave in Scotland. The lava here came from the extinct Heghieș volcano about a million years ago, and quarrying cut through it, laying the columns bare in a single face. Two things nearby fold in easily: the **Red Lake** — a pool in an abandoned quarry coloured brick red by iron oxides — and the turquoise lake beside it, plus the Heghieș crater itself. The site is open and free, and the last stretch of road to it is unsurfaced. **About 45 km north of Brașov.**
The quarry face exposing the whole rank.
A brick-red pool in an abandoned quarry beside it.
Racoș, Brașov county