Transfagarasan

The Transfagarasan (Transfăgărășan) is ninety kilometres of hairpins built across the Fagaras mountains between 1970 and 1974 on Ceausescu's order, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia convinced him he needed a military road over the range. Six million kilos of dynamite and around forty official deaths went into it. It tops out at just over two thousand metres at Balea Lake and only opens from roughly the first of July to the end of October, because the rest of the year the top is under several metres of snow and the avalanche risk closes it outright.