Anina is a coal town high in the Banat mountains, and for a long time it was a place people left rather than visited. The mines here were opened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Austrian authorities and later by a railway company, and the town grew around them, with miners brought in from Austria, Bohemia, Slovakia and elsewhere. The neighbouring settlement of Steierdorf was named after the Styrian settlers who came to work the forests and the coal. The last mine closed after a deadly explosion in the 2000s, and the town has struggled since, with abandoned buildings and an ageing population.
Yet Anina has some remarkable claims. The railway from Oravița to Anina, opened in the 1860s, was the first mountain railway on the territory of modern Romania, a line with tunnels and viaducts often compared to the Semmering in Austria, and a tourist train still runs on it in season. Near Steierdorf, in a cave called Peștera cu Oase, the Cave with Bones, researchers found the remains of some of the oldest modern humans in Europe, around forty thousand years old, which put this quiet corner of the Banat on the scientific map.
The real attraction for riders lies just outside town. To the south lies the Cheile Nerei-Beușnița National Park, where the Nera river has carved a deep gorge through the limestone, with forest, caves and the turquoise lake of Ochiul Bei, the Bey's Eye. On the road east toward Bozovici, the Bigăr waterfall used to spill over a mossy rock in a famous curtain of water; part of it collapsed in 2021, though it remains a lovely spot. The roads around Anina are twisting and hilly, with plenty of curves through dense forest and some steep climbs and descents. Surfaces vary and can be broken, and the weather in the mountains can change quickly.
Anina has a filling station and basic shops, enough to set you up before the gorges. Services in the surrounding villages are limited, and in the national park there are only a few guesthouses and campsites. Oravița, to the west, is a pleasant small town with an old theatre built in the early nineteenth century, one of the oldest in Romania. May and June, when the beech woods are freshly green and the Nera runs high, are the months to come; by October the gorge roads are carpeted in leaves.