Retezat is a granite range in the Southern Carpathians of Romania with more than eighty glacial lakes in it, one cirque hanging above the next. Romanians call it the land of blue eyes, and the lakes are the walk. From the Cârnic trailhead the path climbs through old beech and spruce, past meltwater gathering into cascades among the trees. The timber ends and you come out at Bucura in its open cirque at 2,040 metres, the largest glacial lake in the country. Tents go up along its shore, and the trails fan out from there to the next basins. By evening the granite peaks have laid themselves across the water. Peleaga, the high point at 2,509 metres, is a few hours above it over boulder fields. From the top the crests roll away in every direction and the scattered lakes come into view, cirque below cirque under your boots.
Below the tree line the forest belt is the other half of the range, cooler and greener, and where you go on a day when cloud has swallowed the ridges. The meadows between the lakes hold more than a third of every plant species recorded in Romania, and through July and August they come up in gentians and dwarf rhododendron. Semi-wild horses are turned out on the high pastures for the summer and drift loose among the cirques, unbothered by you walking past between the tarns. The marmots whistling off the scree have a shorter history here than they look: seventeen were carried from the Alps and released in 1973, and their descendants now range over the whole park. The chamois on the ridges have held them since the Ice Age. The name means severed. Folklore blames two giant brothers who fell out over these mountains: the loser took a scythe to the peak and left its top flat, and his severed hand dropped into the range. Its fingers are the four small lakes still called Lia, Ana, Viorica and Florica. Its palm is Bucura, where the tents are.