Caras-Severin County

On July 3, 1771, when the first furnaces and forges were inaugurated at Resita, Romania gained its oldest industrial facility—predating Krupp by 40 years, Skoda by 80. The Habsburg monarchy saw Banat's iron ore and timber as strategic assets, building extractive metallurgy that would pass through Austrian, joint Austrian-French, and finally Romanian ownership. By 1941, Resita's industrial magnetism had created a multilingual factory town: 12,096 Germans, 9,453 Romanians, 1,861 Hungarians working the steel works. Communism expanded the complex to 110,000 workers; post-1989 collapse shrank it to 86,000 by 2006. Romania's third-largest county by area now searches for identity beyond its rusting industrial heritage, where the Danube first enters the country through Iron Gates gorge.