Aleko hut (Vitosha Mountain)

Worth a detour

Named for Aleko Konstantinov, the writer who took three hundred people up Cherni Vrah in August 1895 and effectively started Bulgarian mountaineering. His followers built this by hand between 1924 and 1932, and it is still the hub of the mountain: soup and hot food all day, ninety beds, open year-round. Cherni Vrah is 450 metres above, about an hour and a half on foot.

Story

Background

It is the first hut built on Vitosha and the second oldest in the country, paid for and largely constructed by the hikers and skiers who came after Konstantinov. The Bulgarian Tourist Union owns it; a sports and tourism club called Moten has run it since 2000. It stands at 1,840 metres, three storeys with granite ground and first floors, with a canteen of about 150 seats on the first floor and ninety beds in rooms of two to eight plus a few apartments. The ski slope starts at the door.

The road up from Dragalevtsi is paved the whole way and the drive from central Sofia is about twenty-one kilometres and forty minutes. Parking is free. Bus 66 comes up from the Zoopark stop on weekends and holidays, which is the cheapest way to be standing here without a car.

The complication is the lifts. The Simeonovo gondola's top station is fifty metres from the hut, and the Dragalevtsi chairlift is on the other flank; neither has been dependable for years, and the gondola was declared permanently finished in 2024 when replacement parts stopped being available. Plenty of signage and plenty of websites have not caught up. Plan around the bus or the road, and treat a working lift as a bonus.