Netflix's A Christmas Prince arrived in November 2017 and promptly became one of the platform's most-watched holiday films. The premise is a Cinderella-adjacent royal romance: an American journalist travels to the fictional kingdom of Aldovia to cover a story about a playboy prince, falls for him instead, and discovers he's not what the tabloids claim.
The castle playing "Castle Aldovia" is Peleș. The production filmed extensively on the exterior — the approach road lined with fir trees, the main façade with its turrets, the courtyard — as well as several interior scenes in the Hall of Honor and ground-floor state rooms. The castle's Neo-Renaissance exterior required minimal set dressing; the production design team's main job was keeping modern infrastructure out of frame.
The film didn't identify Romania or Peleș by name, but viewers with a passing knowledge of Romanian architecture identified the location within days of the film's release. Romanian tourism boards subsequently acknowledged the connection, and visitor numbers to Sinaia increased noticeably in the years following.
The sequel brought the production back to Peleș the following year. The Royal Wedding film included more extensive exterior scenes — including sequences shot on the upper terraces and the forested slopes of the castle grounds. Interior scenes again used the Hall of Honor as the primary large-scale location, supplemented by period-accurate rooms elsewhere in the building.
The third film in the trilogy returned to Peleș for a third time. By this point the production had an established working relationship with the National Museum Peleș Complex, which administered the filming permissions. The baby of the title is born within Castle Aldovia's walls — which means, in practical terms, scenes were filmed in the castle's most ornate rooms.
Several of the most recognisable locations from the films are accessible on the standard castle tour:
Peleș has appeared in various European and Romanian productions over the decades, though none with the reach of the Christmas Prince trilogy. The castle's formal rooms and exterior have been used for period dramas and historical documentaries. The specific permissions process is managed by the National Museum Peleș Complex — productions that want to film must apply through official channels.
Most real royal palaces open to tourists look either too institutional (like government buildings) or too ruined (like historical sites) to read as inhabited royal residences on camera. Peleș is unusual because it looks exactly like the setting a royal romance film needs: fairy-tale towers, forested mountain backdrop, grand interiors that don't look like they've been stripped of their furniture. The Neo-Renaissance style reads immediately as "European royal palace" to international audiences without being so recognisably specific that it places the story in a real country. Castle Aldovia could plausibly exist. That ambiguity is part of why the production chose it.
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