How to use this glossary

These are the Romanian terms foreign investors actually meet — in land book extracts, notarial deeds, grant files and emails from lawyers. Each gets a plain-English explanation, not a dictionary translation. If your document contains something not listed here, send us the phrase on WhatsApp and we will decode it; Romanian speakers can go deeper in our full Romanian-language dictionary at /dictionar/.

The institutions

ANCPI — Agenția Națională de Cadastru și Publicitate Imobiliară: Romania's National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration. It runs the national property register, licenses the surveyors allowed to prepare cadastral documentation, and sets the official fees.
OCPI — Oficiul de Cadastru și Publicitate Imobiliară: ANCPI's office in each county — the place where cadastral files are lodged and examined and land books are kept. When Romanians say a plan is "vizat OCPI", they mean the county office has formally received and stamped it.
BCPI — Biroul de Cadastru și Publicitate Imobiliară: The local land registration bureau, a territorial subunit of the county OCPI. Your file's competent BCPI depends on where the property lies.
Notar public — public notary: A state-licensed, neutral legal official who authenticates property deeds; no Romanian real estate sale happens without one. The notary also requests the blocking land book extract and files the buyer's registration.
Persoană autorizată ANCPI — ANCPI-authorized surveyor: The only professionals legally entitled to prepare and sign cadastral documentation. Anyone can draw a map; only an authorized surveyor's file will be accepted by OCPI.

The register and its documents

Carte funciară (CF) — land book: The public register entry describing one property: what it is, who owns it, and what encumbrances burden it. It is the decisive record of ownership in Romania — stronger evidence than any deed held in a drawer.
Extras de carte funciară — land registry extract: The official certified copy of a land book entry. The pentru informare (informative) version is for due diligence and institutional files; the pentru autentificare version is requested by the notary at sale and briefly blocks the register against competing registrations.
Foaia A / B / C — Parts I, II and III of the land book: Part I (A) describes the property; Part II (B) lists the owners and their titles; Part III (C) lists encumbrances — mortgages, easements, litigation, prohibitions. Part III is where deals die, so read it first.
Sarcini — encumbrances: The collective name for third-party rights and notes burdening a property, recorded in Part III. "Liber de sarcini" (free of encumbrances) is the phrase you want to see.
Număr cadastral — cadastral number: The unique national identifier of a registered property. If a parcel has no cadastral number, it has never been registered.
Intabulare — definitive registration: The registration of a permanent real right (ownership, superficie, mortgage) in the land book. Colloquially, "a intabula" a property means to get it properly registered — the service at the heart of our practice.
Prima înregistrare — first registration: The first-ever entry of a property into the cadastre and land book, required for the huge stock of Romanian land that still exists only on paper titles. It involves measurement, documentation and an OCPI file.
Cadastru — cadastre: The technical inventory side of the system: parcel geometry, surfaces and maps. Together with the legal land book it forms Romania's integrated property record.
e-Terra / Geoportal ANCPI: ANCPI's national electronic platform, through which cadastral files are processed, and its public map viewer showing registered parcels. The geoportal is a useful first look, but absence from the map means unregistered, not nonexistent.
Titlu de proprietate — property title: The restitution-era document by which the state returned land after 1991, identifying parcels by agricultural grid references rather than measured coordinates. Valid proof of ownership, but the land it covers usually still needs first registration.

Rights over land

Superficie — superficies / building right: A registrable real right to own constructions on someone else's land, constituted for up to 99 years. It is the standard land-securing structure for Romanian solar projects because — unlike a lease — it binds future landowners and can anchor financing.
Uzufruct — usufruct: The right to use a property and take its fruits (crops, rent) while ownership belongs to another. A property sold with a registered usufruct comes with a legally protected occupant.
Servitute — easement: A burden on one parcel for the benefit of another — most commonly a right of way to a landlocked plot or a corridor for utility cables. Registered easements survive sales, so check Part III for them.
Ipotecă — mortgage: A registered security right over the property for a debt. It follows the property, not the debtor — buying mortgaged land without addressing the mortgage means buying the bank's claim along with it.
Drept de preempțiune — pre-emption right: The statutory priority of certain buyers (co-owners, lessees, neighbours, the state) when extravilan agricultural land is sold, under Law 17/2014. It adds a mandatory offer-and-wait procedure of roughly two months to farmland purchases.
Indiviziune / cotă-parte — undivided co-ownership / ownership share: Ownership held in abstract fractions (e.g. heirs with 1/4 each) without physically divided lots. You cannot fence or build on "your quarter" until a division converts shares into concrete parcels.
Uzucapiune — adverse possession: Acquiring ownership through long, open possession, confirmed by a court. It is the legal path by which decades-old informal occupation of land can be converted into registered title.
Succesiune / certificat de moștenitor — inheritance / certificate of heirs: The notarial procedure settling who inherits a deceased owner's property, concluded by a certificate naming the heirs and their shares. Unsettled successions are the most common blocker of rural land transactions and registrations.
Antecontract — pre-sale agreement: A notarized promise to sell/buy, typically securing a deposit while conditions (registration, pre-emption, financing) are fulfilled. It is where a prudent buyer anchors their due diligence conditions.

Plans, surveys and field work

PAD — plan de amplasament și delimitare: The site and delimitation plan: the cadastral drawing that legally defines a parcel's boundaries and surface for the land book. It is the core piece of any registration file.
Plan topografic — topographic survey/plan: The scaled drawing of a site's physical reality — relief, buildings, roads, utilities — used by designers and required, OCPI-stamped, in permit files. Distinct from the PAD, which defines the legal parcel.
Viză OCPI / recepție — OCPI stamp / reception: The formal acceptance of a plan or documentation by the county cadastre office. Romanian authorities only accept surveyed plans that carry it.
Plan parcelar — parcelling plan: The plan of an agricultural block (tarla) showing its component parcels and holders — the tool for matching restitution titles to actual ground where individual parcels were never surveyed.
Tarla / parcelă — agricultural block / parcel: The grid units by which Romanian farmland is administratively identified: the tarla is a block bounded by roads or canals, containing numbered parcels. Restitution titles cite these numbers, which is why locating "your" land often requires archival and field work.
Trasare — stakeout / setting out: Marking design points or legal boundaries on the ground with survey accuracy, documented by an official report (proces-verbal de trasare). Required at construction start and prudent after any land purchase.
Proces-verbal de vecinătate — neighbour boundary acknowledgement: The signed record by which adjoining owners acknowledge a measured boundary during cadastral works. It prevents tomorrow's boundary dispute at the cost of a few signatures today.
Suprafață din acte / suprafață măsurată — deed area vs measured area: The area written in documents versus the area actually measured on the ground; on older titles they frequently differ. Small differences can be registered within legal tolerances, larger ones require corrective procedures — and the buyer should know which case applies before paying.
Stereo 70: Romania's official national map projection, in which all cadastral coordinates are expressed. Design files and GPS data must be transformed into it correctly — a wrong coordinate system is a classic, expensive documentation error.
As-built (documentație conform execuției): The measured documentation of what was actually built, as opposed to what was designed. Required at works acceptance, plant licensing and refinancing.

Zoning and land status

Intravilan / extravilan: Land inside, respectively outside, a locality's designated buildable zone. Building on extravilan land generally first requires bringing it intravilan through zoning or following special regimes — a fundamental check before buying "cheap land to build on".
Categorie de folosință — land-use category: The official classification of what land is: arable, pasture, vineyard, courtyard-and-buildings, forest, etc. Changing it is a formal procedure, and some categories (like pasture) carry special protective regimes.
Scoaterea din circuitul agricol — removal from the agricultural circuit: The approval procedure for permanently converting farmland to construction use — required, for instance, before building a solar park on arable land. It has its own fees, documentation and timeline.
Certificat de urbanism — urbanism certificate: The town hall's informational act stating a parcel's zoning status, buildability and the permits a project will need. It is the first document of any development and prescribes the list of everything that follows.
Autorizație de construire — building permit: The authorization legally required before construction works begin. Building without one creates structures that may be impossible to register or sell — a due diligence red flag when found on land you are buying.
PUG / PUZ / PUD — urban planning documentation: The general urban plan of a locality (PUG), the zonal plan modifying rules for an area (PUZ), and the detail plan for a single parcel (PUD). Solar and industrial projects on unzoned land typically live or die by the PUZ process, which runs on OCPI-received topographic surveys.
Rol fiscal / certificat fiscal — fiscal record / tax certificate: The property's registration in the town hall's tax records, and the certificate proving local taxes are paid. The tax certificate is mandatory at every sale and most registrations.

Still puzzled by a document?

Romanian property paperwork is a genre of its own. Photograph the passage and send it to us on WhatsApp — decoding extracts, titles and OCPI correspondence for foreign owners is part of the verification work we do every week. For the system behind the words, read the Romanian land registry explained.

Glossary: Romanian Land and Cadastre Terms in Plain English