Bran Castle was never Dracula's home. The fortress on the Rucăr–Bran pass was built from 1377 by the Saxon burghers of Kronstadt — today's Brașov — who financed it out of their own purses under a charter from Louis I of Hungary, and it guarded a customs road rather than a crypt. Romanians call it simply Castelul Bran; the marketing calls it Dracula's Castle. Vlad III Țepeș, the Wallachian prince whose patronymic supplied Bram Stoker a title, likely rode beneath its walls but never held them. Stoker never set foot in Romania. The route now sold as a Bucharest to Dracula Castle Peles Castle and Brasov Guided Tour binds that borrowed legend to two harder histories. The first is dynastic. Peleș Castle rose at Sinaia between 1873 and 1883 as the summer residence of Carol I, the Hohenzollern prince who became Romania's first king. Wilhelm von Doderer drew the initial Neo-Renaissance scheme; Johannes Schultz and later Karel Liman reworked it into the timber-framed silhouette standing now. Its 160 rooms were served by a private hydroelectric plant, making Peleș among the first castles in Europe lit entirely by its own current, and the Hall of Honour still carries a stained-glass ceiling that retracts on a motor. Walnut panelling, Murano glass and an armoury of some 4,000 pieces record a monarchy inventing itself in stone. The second history is mercantile. Brașov grew rich on the pass trade that Bran policed, and Piața Sfatului still frames the fifteenth-century Council House at its centre. The Black Church beside it — begun around 1383, scorched by the great fire of 1689 that gave it its name — remains the largest Gothic building between Vienna and Istanbul, and hangs one of the widest collections of Anatolian carpets outside Turkey, donated by merchants who carried them over the Carpathians. Strada Sforii, 1.32 metres at its narrowest, was cut for firefighters. One Bucharest to Dracula Castle Peles Castle and Brasov Guided Tour tour itinerary threads all three sites into a single arc of mountain road and valley highway. Bran's modern life is stranger than its medieval one. Habsburg neglect left it decaying until 1920, when the citizens of Brașov gave the castle to Queen Marie, who had Liman convert a garrison into a residence of whitewashed corridors and low doorways. Confiscation in 1948 emptied it; restitution in 2006 returned it to her descendant, Archduke Dominic von Habsburg. The rooms hold Marie's furniture, not Stoker's coffins. That reversal surprises many travellers arriving on Bucharest to Dracula Castle Peles Castle and Brasov Guided Tour tours, and it is the reason a Transylvania castle day trip from Bucharest rewards close reading: three separate Romanias, sixty kilometres apart.