Central Balkan National Park

Worth a detour

Created in 1991 along the highest section of Stara Planina, the park protects nine strict reserves — Boatin, Tsarichina, Kozya Stena, Steneto, Sokolna, Peeshti Skali, Stara Reka, Dzhendema, Severen Dzhendem — whose old beech forests were added in 2017 to the transnational World Heritage property covering Europe's primeval beech. Bear, wolf, chamois and vultures are all here. Come for the southern cirques above Karlovo and Kalofer.

Story

Background

The park runs along the crest for most of the central Balkan range, rising to Botev at 2,376 metres, and it is split between high grassland along the ridge and deep forest in the valleys dropping away on either side. Roughly three fifths of it is woodland. The nine reserves inside it are strict ones — research and passage on marked routes only — and they contain the oldest and least disturbed stands.

In 2017 nearly 11,000 hectares of beech across those nine reserves were inscribed as the Bulgarian components of the serial World Heritage property Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe. That listing is about forests that have been left alone long enough to show how European beech behaves without management: very old trees, deadwood on the ground, natural regeneration. It is subtle to look at and important to ecologists. The park also carries the Council of Europe's European Diploma for Protected Areas.

For a walker the defining features are the southern cirques. Above Karlovo and Kalofer the mountain falls more than 1,500 metres in a few kilometres in a series of steep amphitheatres — Dzhendema, the Kalofer cirque — with waterfalls including Raysko Praskalo and Vidimsko Praskalo coming off the rim. Huts along the ridge make multi-day walking straightforward. Brown bear are present in reasonable numbers and chamois are regularly seen on the crags; griffon and other vultures have been reintroduced in the region.