An attempt at historically outlining the towns of the Jiu Valley

Until the middle of the 19th century, the Jiu Valley was the location of a rural world, whose concern was to develop a forest and pastoral economy, which could fit the characteristics of the mountainous region where the Jiu Rivers sprang. The industrial revolution that enters the Transylvanian territory in the 19th century was going to determine the need of primary sources of energy, so that coal and the Jiu Valley, implicitly, where a 2.1 billion tons estimated deposit of brown and pit coal exists, were going to enter the attention of the social and economic processes during the following 150 years. Coal industrial exploitation in the Jiu Valley, started by the ’60s of the 19 th century and still carried on today, determined the radical change of the social, economic and cultural features of the region. Consequently, our analysis attempts at displaying both the manner the six towns of the present-day Jiu Valley came out and their evolution.