Radio Turda has been the local voice of a Transylvanian city built on something few towns can claim: a salt deposit that people have been mining since before the Roman Empire reached this part of Romania. Broadcasting on 107.7 FM since 2002, the station has spent more than two decades soundtracking daily life in a place whose most famous landmark sits 120 meters underground.
A Local Station for Romania's Second City in Cluj County
Turda is one of Romania's oldest continuously important settlements, ranked alongside Alba Iulia, Cluj-Napoca, Iași and Timișoara in historical significance, and today it is the second largest city in Cluj County in northwest Transylvania. Radio Turda, owned by Radio Turda SRL, has served that community since 2002 with a pop and Top 40 format built around local content, including a segment called "Pulsul orașului," the city's pulse, that keeps the programming rooted specifically in Turda rather than drifting into a generic regional format.
A City Built on 2,000 Years of Salt
What makes Turda genuinely unusual is Salina Turda, a salt mine with archaeological evidence of extraction dating back to the pre-Roman period, making it more than 2,000 years old, with written references going back to 1075. For centuries, free workers extracted salt by hand with pickaxes and chisels, paid in florins, ale and bread, through a peak production period spanning the 17th to 19th centuries before the mine finally closed in 1932. It served as a bomb shelter during the Second World War and later as a cheese storage warehouse, an odd afterlife for a site with that much history behind it, before reopening to tourists in 1992.
From Salt Mine to Underground Amusement Park
Today Salina Turda draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, transformed into a genuinely surreal underground attraction 120 meters below the surface, complete with a Ferris wheel, an underground lake open to rowboats, an amphitheater, and even a bowling alley and mini-golf course carved into the salt cavern. It is one of Romania's most visited attractions and gives Turda an identity that punches well above its size as a mid-sized Transylvanian city.
A Local Playlist for a City With a Global Attraction
Radio Turda's own programming stays close to home despite operating in the shadow of a genuinely world-famous landmark, running a schedule of pop and Top 40 shows like "Ore Muzicale," "Hits Only!," "We Love the 80's," and the countdown show "Top 10de10." That mix of contemporary chart music and nostalgia programming is aimed squarely at the people who actually live in Turda, not the tourists passing through to see the salt mine, keeping the station's identity distinct from the attraction that put the city on the map internationally.
The Sound of a City Worth Visiting Twice
Between a 2,000-year-old salt mine turned neon amusement park and a local radio station that has covered daily life in the city for more than 20 years, Turda offers a genuinely unusual pairing: a landmark built on ancient extraction and a modern signal built on keeping locals connected to their own community.