Cherni Vrah

Worth a detour

2,290 metres, fourth in the country after Musala, Vihren and Botev, and the only one of the four you can climb between breakfast and lunch starting from a capital city. From Aleko hut it is 450 metres of ascent on a path, no scrambling. The top is a flat stony dome with a weather station on it rather than a point you stand on.

Story

Background

In August 1895 the writer Aleko Konstantinov brought around three hundred people up here in one group, Ivan Vazov among them, and Bulgarian organised mountain tourism is dated from that day. The anniversary is still marked on the mountain every year. Everything else on Vitosha — the huts, the marked paths, the union that lobbied the park into existence — followed from it.

The summit is measured rather than admired. A weather station has stood here since 1935; the long-term record is a tundra climate, mean annual temperature about 0.3 °C, extremes of −27.4 °C and +22.7 °C, average wind speed 9.3 metres per second, and around 1,175 millimetres of precipitation a year. It is among the windiest peaks in Europe, and the reason is the shape of the mountain: a broad exposed dome with nothing upwind of it.

On a clear day the Rila peaks stand up to the south and you can see most of the Sofia basin laid out beneath you. In cloud you can see the station and very little else, and people still walk up in cloud because the path is obvious and the distance is short. It is short. It is also two thousand metres above the city, and in winter the difference between the two is not a matter of degrees but of kit.