Bran Castle

Bran Castle is a genuine royal residence — it was Queen Marie of Romania's home in the early twentieth century, and the furnished rooms you walk through, including her apartments, are the real story here. The “Dracula's Castle” label is folklore and marketing, not documented history, and it's worth knowing why before you go, so the visit lands as what it actually is rather than a letdown against what the name promises.

Vlad III, “Vlad the Impaler,” the historical figure behind the name, had essentially no real connection to this specific castle — historians are clear that he never owned or lived in anything in Transylvania. Bram Stoker, for his part, never visited Romania or this castle; he took the name “Dracula” from a book about Wallachia and largely invented his fictional castle from imagination. The link between Vlad III and Stoker's novel was popularised much later, in the 1970s, by historians researching the connection — and even they note the two Draculas don't have all that much in common. None of which makes the castle less worth visiting; it just isn't the castle the name suggests.