The Colibiţa Lake is a quite recent discovery on the touristic attractions map of Romania, but it has quickly become a real hype for everyone. It is suggested to go there during summer time, because it’s also called ‘ the sea at the mountains’, but we decided to take advantage of a extended 4 days weekend in January and explore the area around this beautiful lake.

The Colibiţa Lake is situated about 50 km away from Bistriţa Năsăud, which means that for us an extended weekend was really needed, as it’s quite far from where we live. The lake has about 5 square kilometers and we found it completely frozen in January.

The scenery around the lake is absolutely breathtaking, summer might look great, but the winter we found there, made the area even more fascinating. Combined with a very nice weather, so sunny, that we had to take our jackets off when walking around.

Colibiţa Lake is surrounded by the Colibiţa Village, a small village, with houses spread all over the hills, with few people, who still have a traditional life, farming and taking care of big herds of sheep.

The lake is situated at the foot of the Călimani Mountains and this means that you can enjoy some hiking trails to go up for a nice belvedere point over the lake. We also had in plan a one day hiking, but the snow was so big, that we had to give up and explore more the lake and the village around it.

Since this destination has become more and more famous lately, of course now you also get a lot of options for accommodation. There is one big hotel (The Fisherman’s Resort) with a very nice restaurant, which offers mostly fish dishes, but also most of the traditional Romanian dishes. This comes, unfortunately, with the fact that most of the owners of hotels or B&B have built near the lake and it’s almost impossible to actually get to the beach of the lake, as almost all area is private. There are still some small paths leading you to the lake and enjoy the beautiful view.

During the summer time, the place tends to get very crowded, especially during the weekend and there are lots of activities to do around the lake, staring from just laying on the beach, under an umbrella, to horse riding or hiking. For us, it was a very relaxing weekend, with a lot of quiet and calm around us, just like winter time should be 🙂