Persina Nature Park

Worth a detour

The Bulgarian Danube used to be a braided mess of islands, side channels and marsh, and nearly all of it was drained in the twentieth century. Persina, declared in 2000, is the attempt to hold and partly rebuild what survived between Nikopol and Svishtov. Black storks gather here in autumn in numbers found nowhere else in the country. Start at the park's visitor centre in Belene; you will not get far on your own.

Story

Background

The park covers the whole Svishtov–Belene lowland, the steep Danube bank at Nikopol and Svishtov, and every Bulgarian island in that stretch of river — about 217 square kilometres altogether. Inside it sit several older protected areas: the Persinski Blata reserve on the eastern end of Belene island, three linked marshes over 385 hectares; the small reserves on the islands of Kitka and Milka, protected since the middle of the last century for white-tailed eagle habitat; and Kaikusha, 240 hectares of wetland left over from the floodplain that used to run along this whole bank.

The bird list is the reason people come. Great and pygmy cormorants, night, squacco, little, great white and purple herons, spoonbill, glossy ibis, ferruginous duck, common and white-winged tern. Mute swans breed in the marshes. The autumn gathering of black storks is unique in Bulgaria. The Belene island complex was listed under the Ramsar convention in 2002.

Be realistic about access. The single largest piece of the park is an island with a prison on it, several reserves are closed by law, and the good habitat is on water. What the park does well is the visitor centre and the guided end of things; what it cannot do is hand you a trail into the middle of it.