Natural History Museum, Burgas

Worth a detour

The largest natural history collection in south-east Bulgaria, and the only place that will tell you what you are looking at on the lakes before you go out to look at it. Three floors: minerals, plants, insects and reptiles, birds, mammals, and a room on species that have arrived recently. It costs about €3, it is open every day, and it takes forty minutes.

Story

Background

The building is on Fotinov Street, two minutes from the art gallery, and the displays are arranged by group rather than by habitat: minerals first, then vegetation shown through photographs and herbarium sheets, then amphibians, reptiles and insects, then birds and mammals, and finally a section on new arrivals to the region.

Three standing collections give the museum its character. One is on minerals, which in this region means the copper geology of Medni Rid and the volcanic rock of the coast. One covers the flora and fauna of Strandzha, whose oak forest carries an understorey of laurel-leaved shrubs left over from a warmer age and found almost nowhere else in Europe. The third is on the birds of the Burgas wetlands, which is the useful one: the lakes ringing the city hold well over three hundred species between them, and most visitors cannot name a quarter of them.

It is an old-fashioned museum of stuffed specimens and glass cases, and nobody should expect interactive screens. That is rather the point with children, who like the size of things. If you are going to Poda or Atanasovsko afterwards, half an hour here first is a good investment; if you are going to Strandzha, the forest room explains what makes it strange better than any signboard you will find in the park.