From the 1870s, local alpine activists and organisations, international travellers, ‘New Women’, guides and entrepreneurs, and ‘experts’ such as botanists and geologists, explored, documented, and shaped the southern Carpathians. The stories of these ‘New Europeans’ — and the rapid changes in the landscape they helped to effect — build up a picture of a European milieu that was deeply implicated not only in the transformation of the Carpathians but of modernity itself. This paper, with a few short examples, attempts to shift the perspective by exploring what modernity looked like from the perspective of ‘New Europeans’ in a supposed rural periphery in east-central Europe and a ‘murky borderland’. Guides, often neglected in scholarship, draw attention to Carpathian agency; the fast-growing alpine infrastructure was part of an optimism that embraced modernity; and tourists, too often separated out as ‘travellers’, were an integral part of consuming, shaping, and documenting Carpathian modernity.