The Butterfly House (Ro: Casa Fluturilor / Hu: Lepkeház) is the first permanent house of live tropical butterflies in Romania. It’s located in Praid (Székely Land area from Romania inhabited mainly by Hungarians) and it’s an approximate 2.5 hours drive from Sibiu.

We heard about it the first time during our trip to the Lonely Stone in the winter of 2015. We stopped for one night in Praid and visited the salt mine, one of the largest in Romania, but the Butterfly House is closed during winter so we couldn’t visit it at that time.

At the beginning of June, this year, we decided to do a one day trip to Praid and visit the tropical butterflies with our 4 years old daughter, as we thought it would be a super nice experience for her.

The Butterfly House first opened in 2012 as a permanent exhibition in Praid and in 2017 they renovated the place and turned it into a beautiful house, both on the outside, but also on the inside. Besides the 120 m² pavilion, where the butterflies live together with parrots, canaries, other small birds and some small turtles, they also have a coffeehouse with terrace and a very nice souvenir shop inspired by butterflies (including handmade pendants from butterflies wings, homemade chocolate, all sorts of coloring books and games for kids, all related to butterflies).

They also have an incubator. They bring larvae from all over the world, place them in the incubator and let them evolve into beautiful butterflies. So, you can see the different stages of the butterfly – from larva, to caterpillar, to fully grown butterfly.

As butterflies only live a couple of weeks, new larvae are regularly brought in, so it might be that if you visit the butterfly house from time to time, you will see different kinds of butterflies with each of your visits.

The weather was perfect and the butterflies were very active flying around the pavilion. There are slices of fruits (orange, bananas, apples) were the butterflies sit and eat. If you want you can take a slice of fruit and invite the butterfly to eat from your hand, but you must not touch them. Also visitors have to be very careful where they step, because the butterflies can be also sitting on the gravel on the ground.

For kids it’s a very nice experience, but adults will also enjoy walking around these beautiful colored living creatures. If you are lucky some butterflies will lay on you 🙂

Besides their permanent exhibition in Praid, they also deal with the organization and construction of temporary exhibitions on request. More information you can find on their website. Also, check out their Facebook page for more updates.

After the visit at the Butterfly House we had a tasty lunch at Telegdy Ház. We tried the potato soup with tarragon, wild garlic cream soup, polenta with sheep cheese and lard and at desert “Somloi” gnocchi with ice cream. Everything was delicious.