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A map of Bulgaria with sights, roads and settlements. Find places to visit, parking and useful facilities around your chosen starting point.

South Coast

  • Nesebar — A whole medieval town on a rock in the sea.
  • Lake Burgas — Bulgaria's largest natural lake, with a refinery on the skyline
  • Sozopol Old Town — Wooden upper storeys over stone, on a peninsula the Greeks settled around 610 BC
  • Bulgarian Coastline of the Black Sea — 378 km of coast: cliffs and capes in the north, long sand in the south
  • St. Ivan Island — Bulgaria's largest Black Sea island: gull colonies, a lighthouse since 1884, a famous find
  • Lake Atanasovsko — Salt pans beside Burgas where the storks funnel through in late August
  • Lake Pomorie — A working salt lagoon: terns nest in June, flamingos arrive in winter
  • Gulf of Burgas — The widest bay on the Black Sea's western shore, and the reason for everything here
  • Poda Protected Area — Spoonbills, ibises and herons in one colony, ten minutes south of Burgas
  • St. Anastasia Island — A hectare of volcanic rock: monastery, then prison, now a boat trip
  • Cape Emine — Where the Balkan range finally reaches the sea, and the long walk across Bulgaria ends
  • St. Peter Island — The small rock beside St Ivan, protected since 1993 for its nesting gulls
  • St. Cyricus Island — The temple island of Apollonia, then a fishing school, then a naval base, still shut
  • Mesembria — Thracian, Greek and Byzantine walls stacked on one another at the neck of the peninsula
  • St. Thomas Island — Snake Island: a single hectare of rock off Arkutino, inside the reserve and closed
  • Church of Christ Pantocrator — Blind arcading, ceramic saucers and a brick swastika frieze above the apses
  • Lake Mandrensko — A sea lagoon turned reservoir in 1963, and the winter duck water of the bay
  • Apollonia Pontica — The oldest town on this coast, founded around 610 BC and still lying under Sozopol
  • The Bridge, Burgas — Three hundred metres of concrete out into the bay, and the thing Burgas is proudest of
  • Alepu — A lagoon behind a sand bar, and the only water chestnut on the Bulgarian coast
  • Hagia Sophia Church — The Old Metropolis: a roofless 6th-century basilica standing in the middle of the town
  • Pomorie Old Town — Anchialos: a spa town on a rock spit, with salt on one side and the sea on the other
  • Aquae Calidae — Roman baths, Suleiman the Magnificent's hamam, and 41°C water you can still get into
  • Nesebar Archaeological Museum — The Mesembria back-story, right where the old town begins
  • Church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel — Green glazed ceramic in triple rows, and brickwork laid in chessboard order
  • Church of St Stephen — The New Metropolis: 258 painted scenes of 1599 on the walls of an 11th-century basilica
  • Burgas Lakes — Four wetlands round one city, and one of the best places in Europe to watch migration
  • Church of Saint Paraskevi — Nesebar brickwork at its most confident, on a church that lost its dome
  • Medni Rid — A ridge mined for copper since the Bronze Age, with nothing signposted
  • Chengene Skele fishing village — A working fishing village turned museum, fifteen kilometres south of Burgas
  • Archaeological Museum — Apollonia, Mesembria and Anchialos in one room, with the coast's shipwrecks alongside
  • Sozopol Archaeological Museum — The best ancient Greek pottery in Bulgaria, in a small museum on Han Krum square
  • Church of St John Aliturgetos — The finest brick-and-stone facade on the Black Sea, wrecked by the 1913 earthquake
  • Church of Saint John the Baptist — A 10th-century church of rough stone, built over a 6th-century basilica
  • Basilica of the Holy Mother of God Eleusa, Nesebar — A 6th-century basilica half in the sea, on the north shore beside the stone windmill
  • Church of St Theodore — A single-nave church of the 13th century, with staggered zigzag brickwork on two walls
  • Etnographic museum — Strandzha costume and silver in a merchant's house on Slavyanska Street
  • Aleksandrovska Street — The pedestrian spine of Burgas, from the station to the sea in twenty minutes
  • Sveti Vlas — A steep resort town under the last hills of the Balkan range, built round a marina
  • Sarafovo — Four kilometres of sand, a fishing harbour and the best fish dinner near Burgas
  • Rosenets Park (Otmanli) — Oak woods on the first ridge of Strandzha, with a small beach facing St Anastasia
  • Pomorie Monastery — A monastery founded, the story goes, by a Turk cured at its spring
  • Salt Museum Pomorie — Two hectares of working salt pans you can walk round, and the only museum of its kind
  • Holy Cross church — Surp Hach, the Armenian church of 1853, built where a wooden chapel had stood
  • Church of the Holy Saviour — A small 1609 church, sunk below the street, with its murals almost intact
  • History museum (Burgas) — How a fishing anchorage became a port city, told on Lermontov Street
  • Camping Irakli Wild
  • Uzungeren — The salt remnant of the old Mandra lagoon, left behind when the dam went in
  • Church of Saint George in Sozopol — Sozopol's working church, with relics of St John the Baptist and a piece of the Cross
  • Mother of God Orthodox church — The Orthodox Dormition church in the centre, a short walk from the cathedral
  • Irakli (beach) — Two and a half kilometres of undeveloped sand inside two Natura 2000 zones
  • Holy Mother of God Church — The only church in old Nesebar where anything still happens, consecrated in 1894
  • Saints Cyril and Methodius Church — The city cathedral, 33 metres high, built to an Italian design between 1897 and 1907
  • Thracian tomb, Pomorie — A brick mausoleum with a hollow column at its centre, and nothing like it anywhere
  • Kraymorie — The far end of Burgas, where the city stops and the Strandzha coast begins
  • Duni — A purpose-built resort of 1986 on the dunes south of Sozopol, open five months a year
  • Sea Garden — Sixty hectares of imported trees between the town and the sea, planted from 1910
  • Jewish Cemetery in Karnobat — Nearly a thousand gravestones in five languages, the earliest read as 1598
  • Sea Casino Burgas — A 1938 seaside pavilion that spent twenty years shut and is now the city's arts centre
  • Armenian Genocide memorial — A 1990 memorial in the Armenian churchyard to the deportations of 1915–1918
  • Church of the Assumption — The Roman Catholic parish church, built 1936–37 by the city architect
  • Hl Mutter Gottes, Burgas — The Greek Catholic church of the Dormition, part of a girls' school complex
  • Ravadinovo Castle — A castle one man began building in 1996, and the most-visited paid sight on this coast
  • St. Ivan Island lighthouse — The light on Bulgaria's largest sea island, and the only building that still works there
  • Church of the Nativity, Pomorie — The parish church in Pomorie's old quarter, among the ten listed houses
  • Statuya na ribarya — A ten-metre fisherman with a cross and a dove, put up in 2006
  • PlanetUM — A science centre and planetarium in the port zone — the answer to a rainy day
  • Etnografski Kompleks Genger — Aytos municipality's ethnographic complex, part museum and part mehana
  • Park Kapkata — Pomorie's town park, and the shade between the old quarter and the sand
  • Burgas Art Gallery — Strandzha icons and Bulgarian modernism in a synagogue of 1909
  • Natural History Museum, Burgas — Three floors of Strandzha wildlife and minerals, and the birds of the Burgas lakes
  • Gorno Gradishte — The upper citadel at Debelt, listed since 1965 and never presented
  • Antheia — An ancient settlement on the bay between Sozopol and Chernomorets, with nothing to see
  • Aytoska planina — A low wooded ridge west of Burgas, 484 metres at its highest and empty
  • Kolokita — A protected cape south of Sozopol, between the resorts and largely ignored
  • Aquapark Nesebar — The biggest water park on the bay, at Ravda — and the most expensive ticket in this guide
  • Sunset Aquapark — Thirty-two slides at Pomorie, open in summer only and with unheated water
  • Saint John of Rila Church — A parish church of 1934, north of the centre and off every tourist route
  • Chengene skele (zaliv) — A shallow bay south of Burgas with a fishing fleet and a protection order over it
  • Akin — A cape north-west of Chernomorets with an unpresented antique settlement on it
  • Ropotamo — A thousand hectares of river, forest and dune where almost everything is forbidden
  • Church of the Theotokos in Sozopol — A 15th-century church dug into the ground to keep within an Ottoman height limit
  • Rusokastron — Where Ivan Alexander beat a Byzantine emperor in 1332, on a rock above the plain
  • Saint Zosimus church — An 1857 chapel in the town garden, on the ruins of a medieval church
  • Regional Historical Museum — One institution, four buildings, one ticket — the largest museum in south-east Bulgaria
  • Pametnik na Savetskata armia — Alyosha, a Soviet soldier of 1953 standing over the city's busiest square
  • Burgas Lighthouse — Bulgaria's first port lighthouse, first lit in 1899 and rebuilt twice since
  • Festival of sand sculptures — A city of sand sculptures built every July in Park Ezero, on a new theme each year
  • Viewpoint on Sea & Old Nesebar — The lay-by on the Ravda road where the whole peninsula lines up
  • Deultum Museum Complex — A colony of Vespasian's veterans, founded in 69 AD between the two lakes
  • State Opera Bourgas — A full opera house with its own orchestra, chorus and ballet, in a town of 200,000
  • Flora — Domed halls in the Sea Garden, and a flower show that has run since 1980
  • symBiotic — An interpretive space and the Avocet trail on the shore of Atanasovsko lake
  • Bulgarian Dead Sea — Free lye pools and black mud at the southern salt pans, and no attendant in sight
  • Burgas drama theatre — The city's drama company, named for Bulgaria's great tragic actress, on Svoboda Square
  • Summer Theatre Burgas — An open-air theatre of 1957 in the Sea Garden, with 1,970 seats and a summer full of them
  • Historical Museum of Pomorie — Anchialos from the Thracians to the 1906 fire, in a Greek girls' school of the 1890s
  • Chernomorets — Nine kilometres of shore, four bays and the campsite beaches south of Burgas
  • Tsentralen plazh — Two kilometres of sand below the Sea Garden, in the middle of a working city
  • Severen Plazh — 1,700 metres of groomed sand alongside the Sea Garden, with the bars and the sport
  • Clock Tower of Karnobat — A clock tower of 1875 built by Tryavna masons, twenty-three metres to the spike
  • Nos Foros — The Roman tower that gave Burgas its name, dug up in 2008 beside the Poda road
  • Magazia 1 and the port public access zone — The oldest warehouse in the port, opened to the public and now where the boats leave
  • Krasnodar Central Market — Krasnodar: the city's produce and fish market, open seven days from seven in the morning
  • Eco Park Vaya — Seventy hectares on the shore of Bulgaria's largest natural lake, run for birds and horses
  • Tochkata — A dyke above the salt pans where Bulgaria watches the storks come through
  • Lale Bair — Eighty-eight metres above the Mandra basin, and the one view that explains Burgas
  • Ravda — The plain, cheap beach village between Nesebar and Pomorie

North Coast

Strandzha

  • Strandzha — Low border hills that feel a long way from the rest of Bulgaria
  • Strandzha Nature Park — Bulgaria's largest protected area: laurel forest, a border river, fire dancers
  • Sinemorets — Two beaches, a river mouth and the most fought-over sand in Bulgaria
  • Brashlyan — A whole village listed since 1982, with a church dug into the ground and a cell school
  • Beglik Tash — A Thracian rock sanctuary of the late Bronze Age, only revealed to the public in 2002
  • Primorsko — Two long beaches either side of a headland, and the resort that grew from a youth camp
  • Tsarevo — Vasiliko, then Tsarevo, then Michurin, then Tsarevo again — and sixteen beaches
  • Maslen nos — Fiords cut into the rock, a seal cave with no seals, and thirteen species of bat
  • Stamopolu — A protected marsh and oak wood behind the north beach at Primorsko
  • Kiten — A young town on a headland with a sheltered bay on one side and a river on the other
  • Arkutino — The bear swamp: white water lilies, dunes, and a reserve regime that bans sunbathing
  • Silkosiya Reserve — Bulgaria's first reserve, declared in 1931 for an oak wood with a subtropical floor
  • Vitanovo Reserve — 1,106 hectares of Strandzha forest declared in 1981, with no way in
  • Urdoviza — A fortress on the headland between Kiten's two beaches, dug since 2012
  • Silistar — White Pontic dunes, the southernmost sand lily in Bulgaria, and a beach worth the drive
  • Holy Trinity Church in Malko Tarnovo — The Eastern Catholic church of Malko Tarnovo, consecrated in 1936
  • Malko Tarnovo History museum — Four Revival houses in the only town in Strandzha, and a room on the fire-dancers
  • Petrova niva — Where the 1903 rising was planned, on the best viewpoint in Strandzha
  • Arapya — A campsite beach north of Tsarevo, and the last of the old free-camping coast
  • Atliman — Kiten's northern bay, once a coal and timber quay, now shallow and full of children
  • Mishkova niva — A marble rotunda 25 metres across, inside the border zone and mostly robbed away
  • Propada Sanctuary — Forty-eight Thracian mounds in an oak wood three kilometres from Malko Tarnovo
  • Veleka River Mouth — The longest river in Strandzha meets the sea across a 500-metre sandbar
  • Peshterata na Sveta Marina — A cave shrine deep in Strandzha where the sick left tin models of their own organs
  • Most south - eastern point of European Union in continental Europe — Rezovo, where Bulgaria stops: a village of about sixty and a river that is the frontier
  • History museum, Primorsko — The municipal museum that also runs Beglik Tash, in the middle of Primorsko
  • Municipal Historical Museum in Tsarevo — Three floors in Tsarevo, and a hoard of 199 silver coins found at Sinemorets in 2012
  • Ropotamo boats — The pier under the bridge, and the only legal way into the Ropotamo reserve
  • Uzunbodzhak Reserve — 2,661 hectares of primeval oak and beech on the border, and you cannot go in
  • Ognishte za nestinari — The fire-dancers' hearth at Balgari, the one village where the rite still belongs

Sofia & Vitosha

Plovdiv & Thrace

Rila

Pirin & Bansko

Rhodopes

Eastern Rhodopes

Stara Planina

Veliko Tarnovo

Danube & Ruse

North-West

South-West

Central North

Sliven & Kotel

Shumen & Ludogorie