It is located in southwestern Transylvania near the Poiana Ruscă Mountains, and administers five villages: Boș (Bós), Groș (Grós), Hășdat (Hosdát; Hochstätten), Peștișu Mare (Alpestes), and Răcăștia (Rákosd).

The city includes the most important Gothic-style secular building in Transylvania: the Hunyad Castle, which is closely connected with the Hunyadi family.

The city contained the largest steel works in Romania (until Galați took the lead), but activity gradually diminished after the fall of the Iron Curtain due to the loss of the market.

[citation needed] Stone Age tools were discovered in the Sânpetru (Saint Peter) hill near the castle and in the surrounding villages.

The Dacian fortresses of Orăștie mountains, most notably Sarmiszegetusa, which became the most important religious and political center of Dacia, was located close to Hunedoara and was supplied by the iron produced here.

A "Villa Rustica" emerged in Teliuc, a Roman fortification on Sanpetru hill, outpost of the famous legio XIII Gemina whose main castrum was at Apullum in Dacia.

After the Roman military and administrative retreat during the Migration Period, the region had no significant historic sites, although it may be possible that the iron activity continued.

The ethnic structure of the region changed significantly, most notably with Goths, Huns, Slavs, Pechenegs, Magyars, and Cumans.

South of the Carpathians the Pechenegs and Cumans held political power, and Hunedoara acted as a buffer zone for the Hungarian Crown.

The region also had a sizable population of German Saxons, colonizers brought by the Hungarian Crown after the Mongol Invasion and later, Romani who migrated from the Indian subcontinent.

On 18 October 1409, Voyk (Vajk in Hungarian, Voicu in Romanian), was rewarded for military bravery by Sigismund of Luxembourg, and received the domain of Hunedoara.

John Hunyadi consolidated the citadel on top of an ancient fortress, creating the two main halls, for Diet and Knights.

Elected regent of Hungary, he formed a coalition with the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia and engaged in crusades against the Turks to free Serbia and Bulgaria.

The crusade, for a brief period, united the diverging forces of the Balkans, and the victories gained in battles managed to secure the Kingdom of Hungary from Ottoman occupation for over a century.

[3] In 1457 Matthias gave permission to the Wallachian serfs to build an Orthodox church, beautifully decorated with paintings and preserved until today.

The castle of Hunedoara became one of the biggest in the medieval world, standing as a witness to the greatness of his family of noble warriors and statesmen, in an era of war and despair for the region, as the Ottoman Empire approached Central Europe.

Gabriel Bethlen Voivode of Transylvania consolidated and enlarged the castle, and gave it to his nephew Stephen Betlen who lived here with his wife Mary Széchy, famed for her beauty.

The Reformed Church of Hungary was established in Hunedoara in 1634 and Imre Thököly, one of the leaders of the Protestant anti-Habsburg uprising and later Prince of Transylvania owned the castle and spent much time living in it.

The modern iron operations began at the foot of Saint Peter hill (Sanpetru), close to the most distant tower of the castle called Nebojša, (Serbian for "have no fear", a tower that was the furthest away from the castle in medieval times, to provide last refuge in the case of a siege; cf.

The first tall industrial furnace in the world for iron extracting, it has been argued,[citation needed] was built in 1750 in Topliţa near Hunedoara, and a later one in Govăşdia in 1806.

Until 2001, there was a system of narrow-gauge railway built in the 19th and 20th centuries that ran from Hunedoara castle, near Zlaşti through a 747 and a 42 meter long tunnel through the mountain, and the breathtaking landscape of "Ţara Pădurenilor" (Woodlanders' country) before arriving to Govăjdia.

In the 18th and part of the 19th century, as the town of Hunedoara became more and more industrialized, peasants from regions nearby began to move to the city and the population increased.

The peasants of Hunedoara county supported the Revolt of Horea, Cloşca and Crişan in 1784, when they unsuccessfully besieged the nearby fortress of Deva.

The Romanian populations in and around the city quickly earned political rights and representation, and industrial development continued at an ever-increasing rate.

After the Soviet occupation and the subsequent communist regime, industry was favored, and Hunedoara had for a time the biggest steel-producing plant in Romania and the Balkans.

The number of Hungarians dwindled after the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 when Transylvania became part of Romania, while the fall of Communism in December 1989 saw most German families leaving the town and the country to Germany.

During the Communist era, as the Steel Works were functioning the population peaked at 89,000, as workers moved in from the surrounding countryside as well as Oltenia and Moldavia.

In the transition era that followed the fall of communism, a large percentage of the Romanian population lost their jobs and many left the town in search for better opportunities elsewhere.

Vlad Dracul, the ruler of Wallachia, the father of the notorious Vlad Dracula, was imprisoned here, as he had fallen into disgrace with Hunyadi, not providing the help promised (Dracula, who had once been traded as a hostage to the Ottomans by his own father, later became a protégé of Hunyadi, and took over Wallachia shortly before his mentor's death of fever).