The village of Roșia Montană boasts an impressive inventory that illustrates a diversity of architectural styles, eclectic influences fused with local tradition, a cosmopolitan settlement whose roots and embellishments are based on freeholders’ exploitation of gold. Characteristic buildings with outer porches form a typological background to a series of distinctive and mostly decorative features that were borrowed from the repertoire of Classical or Baroque architecture. This structure, distinguished also by grand walls and monumental gates that face winding roads, gradually gives way in the industrial suburbs to miners’ households consisting of wooden dwellings above high stone-built basements, many of which housed ore-processing workshops with water sumps fed by springs that could be used in the harshest of winters.
