"A few months ago I wouldn't even let the sheep get near the water, which was six metres (20 foot) deep. Now the Danube is so dried up that I can often see the river bed," said Tudor, as he stood on the banks of the river near the southern town of Dichiseni.

On the other bank, at the town of Chiciu near the Bulgarian border, 15 people were waiting for the ferry under a blazing sun.

"We get the ferry to the other side every day to go and work. Now that the Danube is almost dry, we'll soon be able to walk to the other side," said Petre, a man in his fifties.

According to Mihail Ene, an official at Chiciu's river port authority, navigation on his stretch of the Danube has been problematic for several days, thanks to water levels that have dropped almost a metre.

At only 1,700 cubic metres a second, the volume of water flowing down the Danube in Romania is today almost a third the usual average for August.

"I've been navigating these waters for 40 years and this situation is unprecedented. I've never seen such a drought," said Ene.

Some 50 kilometres (30 miles) to the east, workers from the port were trying to refloat a convoy of barges stuck on the river's Bulgarian bank for the last five days, while horses munched on the recently uncovered greenery of the river bed.

Further downstream, where several boats are stuck at Turnu-Magurele, the president of the local ship-owners association, Mihai Georgescu, is worried.

"Traffic on the Danube is virtually paralysed. We're in danger of losing huge quantities of perishable goods which are transiting through Romanian ports," said Ene, adding that "hundreds of millions of dollars (euros)" were at risk.

The lack of rain has also meant that the Iron Gates hydroelectric power station is now running at only 25 percent capacity, while the forecast is for the river level to continue dropping for at least another five days.

Late Saturday, authorities announced they were for the first time shuttering the Cernavoda nuclear plant, near the banks of the Danube, because of a lack of cooling water.

"The level of the Danube dropped from one day to the next from 125 to 120 centimeters, which as a result meant a drop in the quantity of water needed for cooling the reactor," the secretary of state for energy, Iulian Iancu, told AFP.

The government has already announced that the cost of electricity, heating and natural gas in Romania's cities will jump by between 12 and 22 percent from September 1.

The Danube's dropping water levels have also led to an unexpected find: recently the ruins of a 10th-century Byzantine fortress at Pacuiul lui Soare in southern Romania, swallowed by the river in the 15th century, reappeared.

"It's the oldest fortress ever discovered in Romania and we're very happy to be able to begin exploring it," said Petre Diaconu, an 80-year-old archeologist now working on the site.

Previously hidden beneath the water, this fortress caused a number of unexplained boat accidents, a smiling Diaconu said.

"Today, the waters have given us back what belonged to us. You see, one person's misfortune is sometimes another person's joy."

TERRA.WIRE