If you last saw Craiova in the middle of the 2010s, you would recognise the streets and almost nothing else about how the city is used.
Nothing dramatic happened. No landmark project, no capital-of-culture year, no sudden money. What happened is a series of small changes that each looked trivial and together changed what a normal evening here is.
The coffee thing happened
Ten years ago the choice was a terrace, a chain, or a cafeteria with a thermos. Today there is a genuine specialty coffee scene — small roasters, people who know what they are selling, places you would sit in for two hours.
This matters more than it sounds. A city with good cafés has somewhere to be between things, and the entire shape of a visitor's day depends on that.
The driver is the university. Specialty coffee lives on a young, regular, local clientele, which is exactly what twenty thousand students are.
Places in this piece
The centre got more walkable
Pedestrianisation crept outwards from Calea Unirii. Not as a single announced project — in stages, street by street.
The effect is that the central corridor now reads as one continuous space rather than a shopping street with traffic around it. Where to park changed accordingly, and anyone navigating from a ten-year-old memory will get it wrong.
The Christmas market became a national event
This is the biggest single change.
A decade ago it was a municipal gesture. Now it opens in mid-November, before Sibiu, Bucharest and Brașov — here is why — it fills the hotels, and people drive from other counties for it.
For about six weeks a year, Craiova is a destination. That had not been true in my lifetime. See where to stay for it and what it costs.
The restaurants got serious
Not uniformly, but the top end moved up a long way, and the middle followed. Where to eat today is a list; ten years ago it was two or three names repeated by everybody.
The interesting part is that the improvement is largely in regional cooking done properly rather than in imported cuisines — what Oltenians eat, cooked with intent.
Where to stay nearby
Live prices and availability on a map centred on this exact spot — hotels, apartments and hostels, so you can judge the walk from here rather than guess from an address.
Bookings made through this map earn us a commission. Your price is unaffected.
The old town turned into a drinking quarter
Craiova's old town was quiet in the evenings. It is not now. Craiova at night describes something that essentially did not exist in this density ten years ago.
Whether this is an improvement depends entirely on whether you live above it.
Cycling became plausible
Not solved — plausible. There is infrastructure now, there are people using it, and the city's flatness finally counts for something. Cycling in Craiova is a real page rather than a theoretical one.
The airport grew up
Routes came and went, but the baseline is higher than it was, and getting here from outside the country no longer always means Bucharest plus a long drive.
Much of this rests on business travel to the car plant rather than tourism, which is worth knowing when you look at the schedule.
The car plant changed hands
In 2022 Ford of Europe transferred the factory to Ford Otosan — the full sequence is here — with new investment tied to electrification, and the Puma and Transit Courier now built here.
For the city this is the difference between a plant winding down and a plant with a next decade, and it underwrites most of the rest of this list.
What did not change
Being honest, because lists like this get triumphalist.
- There are still almost no guides — that gap is as wide as ever.
- Tourism promotion is still minimal, which is a large part of why nobody knows about Craiova.
- The outer districts improved less than the centre. The neighbourhood pages are candid about this.
- July is still July. No amount of urban improvement helps.
What it adds up to
A city that was perfectly fine to live in and hard to recommend has become a city that is good to live in and defensible to recommend.
That is a smaller sentence than "transformation", and it is the accurate one. If you are deciding whether to come, is Craiova worth a visit makes the case on current conditions rather than on nostalgia.
If you are returning after a decade
Three practical notes. Re-check the parking — the pedestrian zone is larger than you remember. Book earlier for November and December than you would have had to. And go back to the art museum if your memory of it predates taking the six Brâncuși seriously, because that is now the thing the city should be known for.
