Harghita has spent the last few years building toward 2027, when it becomes Europe’s Region of Gastronomy. Most of that preparation has happened where visitors never look: in restaurant kitchens, in certification paperwork, in tasting panels deciding which fifty dishes deserve to represent a county.
But on May 26, 2026, something different opened to the public. At Timian Chalet, a small family farm at the foot of the Harghita Mountains, the county launched Open Farm, a program built on a simple idea: let people see where the food actually comes from.
46 farms, dairies, apiaries, and small processors applied. 33 were certified, meeting standards for accessibility, parking, visitor space, and multilingual information. They now open their gates by prior appointment, year-round, and twice a year for Open Farm Weekend, when several locations run special tastings and demonstrations at once. The first weekend, May 29 to June 1, drew almost 900 visitors across fourteen farms. The second runs September 25 and 26.
“We continue to expand the county’s tourism offer and systematically integrate into the tourism circuit those places that can most authentically tell our story: the journey of food from producer to consumer,” said Szabó Károly, executive director of the Harghita Community Development Association, which coordinates the program.
From Milk to Cheese
At Tejbánya, a working farm and cheese workshop, visitors watch raw milk become aged mountain cheese the way it has been made here for generations, without chemicals or fertilizers anywhere in the process. The farm also runs wine and cheese tastings, book presentations, and the occasional career talk for young people weighing whether to commit to this kind of life.
A short drive away, Timian Chalet sits beside a mountain stream on the site of a former goat farm, where the philosophy is closer to self-sufficiency than business plan: the vegetable garden, the orchard, and the animals supply what ends up on the table. At Sólyom Major, near the village of Șoimușu Mic, the farm has run as a proper gastronomic point since 2019, the first in the county built explicitly on a farm-to-table model, alongside horse riding, carriage rides, and a small museum house of old rural tools.
Honey and Herbs
György Hatos keeps bees in Cristuru Secuiesc, where he also serves as the village’s deputy administrator, and his apiary walks visitors through what a hive actually looks like inside: the workers, the drones, the queen, the brood, the slow accumulation of pollen that becomes honey.
Not far away, two family operations work the other side of the county’s plant knowledge. István Gáspár, a second-generation herbalist in Zetea, has spent fifteen years studying and processing medicinal plants with his family, work he describes as staying in rhythm with the Harghita landscape he grew up in. In the village of Orotva, the Csibi family keeps a herb garden built on recipes that have survived in local households for generations, turned into teas, tinctures, and ointments meant to be used, not just admired.
Meat, Salt, and What Survives Fire
In Izvoare, at the foot of Harghita Mădăraș, the Berke facility processes game, lamb, Mangalița pork, and ordinary pork using modern equipment, but the county’s strangest meat story belongs to a small Mangalița farm near Praid.
There, ham is cured the old way: aged for two to three years in the salt and steady humidity of a working salt mine, a method that began in the Praid mine itself and continued, after it flooded, in an artificial salt chamber built on the surface.
For the Smaller Visitors
At Tófalvi Adventure Farm, in Fântâna Brazilor, the focus shifts entirely to families. More than a dozen domestic animals are available not just to look at but to feed and pet, built around Székely farming traditions explained for children rather than adults, with accommodation on site for anyone who wants to stay past the afternoon. It is, by design, the gentlest entry point into the whole program.
Visiting
Most Open Farm locations require advance booking, since these are working farms, not attractions built for foot traffic. The simplest way in is the Open Farm Weekend, held each spring and autumn, when participating farms run open days with tastings, demonstrations, and direct contact with the animals.
Outside those dates, the full list of certified farms and contact details is available on Visit Harghita’s own platform.
None of this was built for spectacle. It exists because Harghita already had the farms, the cheese-makers, the beekeepers, and the herbalists, and someone finally organized a way to let visitors in. That, more than any title from Brussels, is what a region of gastronomy is supposed to look like.
© Photos courtesy of Visit Harghita
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