5 minutes drive from Alba-Iulia, at the foot of the Apuseni Mountains, there is a quiet mountain village named Ampoita. As everywhere in the Apuseni area, the locals are nice with the passers-by and their ladies are famous cooks. In addition you have fresh air, lots of activities and good, healthy food. What more could you possibly ask for from life?
The village is flanked on both sides of the Ampoita river by two spectacular rock formations: close to the entrance to the village, the limestones of Ampoiţa – a reservation made up of three blocks of 10-50 meter and Piatra Boului (The Stone of the Ox) – easy to escalate and with a small plateau at the top, from where you can have a breathtaking view of the surroundings. These places become often meeting places for the climbers. The church of Ampoita was built around 1500 AD. In the meantime, it became a historical monument and, as in most rural communities of Transylvania, it is the meeting place of the locals on Sundays or other religious holidays.
At Ampoiţa there is also a small ethnographic museum, inside which is exhibited a large number of agricultural tools, paintings, pieces of wooden furniture, traditional towels, clay pots and folk costumes. The museum adds an extra touch of prettiness to the region, being in the same time a center of local tradition conservation.
From Ampoita, the road continues to the Ampoita Flood, Metes Meadow, then turns into a forest road among the mountain. A few kilometers from the village, after a short walk through the woods, you reach the Ampoita Gorge, a wild place in the middle of nature that represents, thanks to its karst appearance, a permanent research area for speleologists but also a very popular tourist destination. The length of the Gorge is 1,300 meters and it has tall walls, up to 100 meters high. Here, the predominant rock is limestone. From the gorges, there are only a few hundred meters down to the Bats Cave, where, as its name indicates, there lives a colony of bats for the protection of which the cave was sealed with an iron grid.
For those who are going to spend here several days, or for those who only want to regain forces overnight, there are many guest houses in Ampoita they can choose from.
