My project examines the tension between socialist Romania’s promotion as a clean and healthy environment so as to lure tourists and its industrial modernization strategy in the Carpathians that involved major changes in the natural landscape. It argues that tourist experts in Romania skillfully navigated between promoting the country as having a clean environment and unspoiled landscapes and its overall developmental strategy, which involved intensive urbanization, as a way to achieve modernization. This tension was especially notable among the Romanian political elites who believed that economic underdevelopment justified a certain ambivalence in relation to the environment. This perspective challenged that of many natural scientists and tourist specialists who in the 1970s argued that the notion of economic efficiency had to include the issue of environmental protection.