Dracula theme park plan bites the dust

Romania has dropped plans to build a massive Dracula theme park in the heart of Transylvania after protests from environmentalists and Prince Charles.

Oak trees older than 400 years were to have been cut down to make way for the construction of a fake castle on a 120-hectare (300-acre) site, overlooking Sighisoara, a picturesque medieval town.

But Dracula-land will probably now be built closer to the capital, Bucharest, or near the site of the Count Dracula figure's real castle, on the Arges river near Targoviste.

The Romanian tourism minister, Agathon Dan, had promised wooden stakes, underground tunnels, real bats and mock-blood to lure up to a million tourists and £13m a year in revenue. But potential foreign investors were not impressed with his mathematics, and Bucharest issued bonds to try to finance it.

The climbdown began in May, when Prince Charles visited Sighisoara to see the restoration of the beautiful but dilapidated villages nearby.

"Large scale development would be wholly out of character with the area, and will ultimately destroy its character," Prince Charles said after his visit.

Unesco, the UN's cultural body, was also against the plan.

Dracula himself was not a vampire but a cruel 15th-century Wallachian prince, Vlad Tepes, known as "the impaler" because of his habit of impaling enemies on wooden stakes.

Pamphlets about his exploits became popular in Europe in the middle ages. Germans depicted him as a monster, Russians as a hero trying to liberate his people from Turkish and Hungarian oppression.