Air quality has deteriorated in Romania in recent years, especially in parts of the capital and other major cities.
So it might come as surprise to learn that the purest air in Romania is just an hour’s drive from the capital.
Slanic, a tourist destination located 100 kilometers from Bucharest, is visited by thousands of tourists every year.
The spa town is in the Prahova valley, north of Bucharest in the Carpathian foothills.
It’s 44 kilometer north of the city of Ploiesti and famous for its salt lakes and spa which have been open to tourists since 1853.
It is considered a tourist resort of national interest as it has the largest salt mine in Europe…. and now Romania’s cleanest air.
The salt mine has a sanatorium with 50 seats, with beds, chairs and tables where visitors who have respiratory diseases can spend a few hours in silence, enjoying a natural treatment that can cure them or improve lung disease.
Toxic air is quietly killing millions each year from respiratory illnesses to heart disease, experts say.
The World Health Organization (WHO) published its Global Strategy on Health, Environment, and Climate Change in February 2020.
Its message was that we are running out of time to mitigate and reverse the devastating environmental impact of industrialisation and urbanisation, which, together with widespread loss of species and habitat, directly causes 13 million deaths each year.
The figure accounts for one quarter of all human fatalities. Air pollution is now responsible for the annual loss of 7 million lives.
Poorer communities are most vulnerable because lower cost homes are often closer to polluting infrastructure than higher value properties.
Globally, Swiss air quality specialist IQAir ranks 35 cities in India among the 50 most polluted on Earth, with levels of toxic fine particulate matter (PM2.5) on an average day in New Delhi double that of Beijing, itself a metropolis notorious for smog.
Breathing Space. Romanian cities among EU’s worst places for air pollution
