A fortress occupied this location long before Vlad the Impaler arrived. Near the beginning of the 13th century, Wallachians built Castle Arges somewhere along this stretch of river, and by the mid-14th century it had become the main citadel of the Basarab dynasty. Over the following decades, the castle changed hands and names several times before falling into ruin. What Vlad found in 1459 was a strategic position with crumbling walls -- a precipice of rock overlooking a canyon carved by the Arges River, facing the western approach to the Transfagarasan route through the Fagaras Mountains. He rebuilt the fortress using stones from the older Castle Poenari, which had stood on the opposite bank at a lower elevation. To supply the labor, Vlad arrested his enemies among the Wallachian nobility and forced them to carry building materials up the mountain. The castle that resulted was compact but formidable, its position doing most of the defensive work that walls and towers would normally provide.

Vlad died in 1476, possibly assassinated, possibly killed in battle against the Ottomans -- the circumstances remain disputed. The castle continued to serve as a military outpost for decades after his death, but it was gradually abandoned during the first half of the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, Poenari was in ruins. The mountain itself then began reclaiming the structure. On January 13, 1913, an earthquake triggered a landslide that brought down sections of the castle walls, sending masonry crashing into the river below. Further earthquakes in 1940 and 1977 caused additional damage. Modest repairs have been made, and the remaining walls and towers still stand, but Poenari exists today in a state of arrested collapse -- part ruin, part geological event, the mountain slowly taking back what was built upon it.

The 1,480 stairs that lead to Poenari Castle are the price of admission, and they are not optional. There is no road to the top, no cable car, no shortcut. The staircase switchbacks up through forest, the concrete steps uneven in places where tree roots have shifted the foundations. The climb takes roughly thirty minutes for a fit walker and considerably longer for everyone else. At the top, the reward is not a museum or a reconstructed interior but an open ruin on a wind-scoured plateau with views down the Arges Valley. Since 2009, the site has been administered by the Arges County Museum. A smaller replica of the castle was built in Bucharest's Carol Park in 1906 for the Romanian General Exhibition, and it still stands -- one of the few surviving structures from that event. The replica is open to the public only twice a year: on Heroes' Day and on the Romanian Army National Day, October 25.

Poenari's association with Vlad the Impaler -- the historical figure who inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula -- has drawn the castle into popular culture in ways that range from scholarly to absurd. The 2013 television series Da Vinci's Demons staged a scene here. The video game Fallout 3 named a settlement "Arefu" after the village six kilometers from Poenari and gave it a vampire-themed quest. The Hardy Boys visited in the 1970s. A 2020 documentary declared Poenari the true Dracula's castle because it has the "heart" of Vlad III. Even the supernatural tourism industry has taken note: during Romania's communist era, foreign visitors who spent the night inside the ruins reported plunging temperatures, the smell of rotten flowers where none grew, and an overpowering sense of being watched. Whether this is atmosphere or something else, the castle does not lack for stories. What it lacks is convenience, and that may be its greatest asset.