The Sulphur Spring at Puciosu

Puciosu is a stream and a valley, not a viewpoint to stop the car for. The name says what is there from the start: pucioasă means sulphur, and the water coming out of the mountain is sulphurous. The whole commune lived off it for a while.

The stream is a tributary of the Bistrița Aurie and joins it at 835 metres. Geological writing measures the Dadu–Iacobeni mining area from that point upwards, as far as 1,523 metres at Dadu peak. The DN17 climbs the Puciosu valley towards the Mestecăniș pass at 1,096 metres, and the stretch of national road that runs through the village of Mestecăniș is called Strada Puciosu, Sulphur Street.

The water that made the baths

A bath house was built on the sulphurous and low-mineral springs here in 1927. Between the wars people came for treatment on a plain recipe, which a local man recounts in the Suceava press: sulphur water from Puciosu, mud brought from the neighbouring villages, a month or a month and a half of staying put, and at the end people walked home on their own feet.

The spa is gone. The spring is not: it is not captured, not laid out and not signposted, it simply runs into a stream. Whoever comes here comes to a valley with a national road in it and to water running unused, not to a resort.

Gold at the mouth of the stream

At the mouths of the streams joining the Bistrița Aurie, Puciosu among them, there were gold-washing settlements in the Austrian period. That is where the river gets its name. Higher up, on the same slopes, iron, copper and manganese were worked, and the old spoil heaps were replanted with conifers after the workings closed.

Getting there

From the centre of Iacobeni the DN17 climbs towards Mestecăniș and the pass. The Puciosu valley is the way up, and the village of Mestecăniș sits in it. The exact spot of the spring is not marked on maps and appears in no register of protected areas; the safest thing is to ask at the town hall before setting off.

Come dressed for the mountains even if you do not climb far: you are in a narrow valley where the weather turns quickly and where lorries use the road. Do not drink from the spring.