Arapya

Worth a detour

Arapya is a wide bay a few kilometres north of Tsarevo with a campsite behind it, and it has kept more of the informal, tent-and-guitar character of the old Bulgarian coast than almost anywhere else you can drive to. The water is clean and the sand is deep. The umbrellas, at about €6 each, are not cheap, which is worth knowing before you arrive with nothing.

Story

Background

The beach is one of sixteen in Tsarevo municipality, which between them run to more than nine kilometres of sand. Arapya is a concession beach with lifeguards and the usual apparatus, and the ministry's register puts the umbrella and lounger at six euros apiece — the top of the range for this coast and the same as Chernomorets.

What distinguishes it is what is behind. The campsite has been here for decades and the atmosphere in it is closer to the 1980s than to anything in Sunny Beach: pines, tents, caravans, cheap grills, people who have been coming to the same pitch for thirty years. This is the coast Bulgarians remember, and it survives in only three or four places.

The practical caveats are those of the far south generally. Everything shuts at the end of September. The road down from Burgas is single-carriageway with three separate structural restrictions on its northern half and a light-controlled single-lane bridge at Tsarevo, so allow more time than the distance suggests. And the far south has no back road: what you drive in on, you drive out on. Nestinarka, the other Tsarevo campsite beach, is a few kilometres south and is by some distance the cheapest guarded beach in the country for sunbeds.