Classroom lesson · The Carpathian Mountains · 🇷🇴 Romania

The Carpathian Mountains

Europe's wildest forests - and home to most of its brown bears

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

The Carpathian Mountains curve right through the middle of Romania like a giant letter C. They are covered in some of the oldest and wildest forests in Europe. More brown bears live in these forests than anywhere else on the continent.

Tell me more

The Carpathians stretch across seven countries, but more than half of the whole mountain range is inside Romania. The highest peak in Romania, Moldoveanu, is 2,544 metres tall - about seven times the height of the Eiffel Tower.

The forests here are special because they have been left alone for a very long time. Some of them are 'old-growth' forests, which means no one has ever chopped them down. The trees are huge and old, and the ground is thick with moss, mushrooms and fallen logs. Scientists from all over Europe come to study them.

Around 6,000 brown bears live in these mountains - the largest brown bear population in Europe outside Russia. Wolves and Eurasian lynx live here too, all in the same forest. It is one of the few places on the continent where all three big predators still walk together in the wild.

Romanians love these mountains. Many families have a small wooden cabin or know a village in the foothills where grandparents live. In winter people ski; in summer they hike, pick wild berries, and listen out for the call of the cuckoo.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

01Why might it matter that some forests are left untouched? What lives in a forest that has never been chopped down?
02How would you feel about living in a village where bears sometimes walk through the woods nearby?
03Bears, wolves and lynx all share the same forest. How might they each find enough to eat without bumping into each other?

Try this

Classroom activity

On A3, draw a cross-section of a Carpathian mountain. Start with farm villages at the bottom, then beech forest, then spruce forest, then bare rocky peaks above the trees. Place one animal in each band: red deer in the beech, lynx in the spruce, chamois on the rocks. Bears wander across all of them.

The Carpathian Mountains

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Discussion prompts

Classroom activity

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