# How Romania's tourism breathes

*Marius Comper · 9 September 2026 · [HTML edition](https://mariuscomper.uk/respiratia-turistica/en/) · [Ediția în română](https://mariuscomper.uk/respiratia-turistica/)*

In Fundata, a commune of 656 people in Brașov county, tourists leave 146 overnight stays per resident every year, and yet its tourist year is nearly as balanced as Bucharest's. At the seaside the picture flips entirely: nearly a third of all nights reported in Romania, every year from 2023 to 2025, landed in just two months, July and August. Among the 712 localities with enough tourism to trace a year at all, a clustering algorithm separates them most cleanly into just two shapes of year.

- **32.6%** of nights reported in Romania, 2023-2025 average, fell in July and August alone.
- **712** localities reported enough tourism, three years running, to compute a shape for their year; another 444 were set aside.
- **146 nights** per resident, per year: that's what Fundata (population 656) hosts, the most intensely visited locality in the series.
- **0.49** is the silhouette score of the clearest split the algorithm finds, among every one tested from two to nine groups.

## Every locality has its own year

For every locality, INS counts how many nights tourists spend there each month. Dividing each month by the year's total produces a "signature," a percentage per month. Mamaia, the largest resort on the coast, has no figures of its own: it's a beach district of Constanța, and the city's figures likely reflect, without separately proving, its summer (61.3% of the year in July-August). Băile Felix appears in the figures for Sânmartin commune (Bihor), with a longer, gentler summer. Predeal, a ski resort, has a surprisingly flat year: winter and summer balance out instead of one dominating (11.4 "effective months" out of a possible 12). Bucharest is the flattest of all, a city with tourists year-round.

## Two tourist Romanias

You might expect Romanian tourism to have many patterns: summer, winter/ski, spa, city-break, weekend, nearly season-free. The clearest split (k-means on the monthly signature of all 712 localities, silhouette score 0.49) separates them into just two: 597 localities with a nearly whole year, including, surprisingly, the ski resorts, whose winter and summer peaks balance out, and 115 localities dominated by the coast, with over half their nights in July-August. A finer three-way split (weaker silhouette score, 0.28, but still real separation) reveals a third shape: 224 localities with a long summer, less sharp than the coast, spa and lake towns such as Sânmartin, Băile Herculane and Vatra Dornei, made up of 164 localities drawn from the nearly-whole-year group and 60 from the coast-dominated one. A "weekend Romania" cannot be shown from this data: INS counts by month, not by day of the week.

The HTML edition has an explorer with all 712 localities, each with its own signature, effective months, average stay and tourist intensity (nights per resident).

## Method, briefly

Data: INS TEMPO-Online, monthly matrices TUR104H (arrivals) and TUR105H (nights), accommodation type "Total", January 2010 - July 2026. Each locality's signature is the equally-weighted average of the shape of 2023-2025, a window chosen because it sits entirely after INS's 2021 methodology revision (when apartments and rooms for rent entered the count) and skips the pandemic years. A locality is included only if it reported in all three years and its total is at least 3,000 nights. Seasonal concentration is measured with the Herfindahl-Hirschman index on the 12 monthly shares; "effective months" are 1/HHI. Tourist intensity uses the population registered as domiciled as of 1 January 2026 (INS POP107D), matched by SIRUTA code.

The full method, with every caveat, is on the [HTML page](https://mariuscomper.uk/respiratia-turistica/en/#method).