The short one. Twenty minutes north of the centre the city stops and the road runs out into flat farmland, and the Işalnița power station stands alone on the horizon — cooling towers and chimneys above an empty plain, the kind of thing that usually only exists in a film. It is real, it is working, and you can see it from the roadside. At the same spot there is a small unnamed shop selling coffee at 4 lei — about a quarter of the central price — with very friendly staff. It carries no name on the map, so the coordinates below are how you find both the view and the coffee. Out and back before lunch: that is the whole trip.
Go in the morning, before the heat sits on the plain and while the light is still behind you. Pull in at the coordinates below, take the view from the roadside, get a coffee, drive back. It costs a tank of nothing and it is the strangest half hour you will spend near this city.
Very friendly staff, and the coffee costs 4 lei. Nothing in the centre comes close on price. Everything else on this page is information. This is a recommendation, and it is mine.
It is a lignite station, and you can smell it. Downwind of the stacks the air carries the plant — sulphurous, unmistakable. It has been smelled twice from the ground: out east of the city, and at the railway station. Both of those sit in the same narrow cone running east-south-east from the towers — bearings 122° and 130°, ten and a half kilometres out — so on both days the wind was in the west and pushing the plume out over the eastern side of the city. That is the austru, the named wind of this plain, out of the west and south-west and at its strongest in summer. It is variable, which is why the cone in the drawing below swings rather than sitting still, and we have no published wind rose for the city to put a number on how often it points your way. When the wind backs round to the north-west the plume swings over the northern edge of the city instead. None of this is dangerous for a morning out — it is the reason the horizon looks the way it does, and worth knowing before you plan to sit somewhere in its lee.
Işalnița road, north of Craiova