Pirin National Park

Worth a detour

Pirin is limestone and marble where Rila is granite, and it shows: paler rock, sharper ridges, and cirques full of small cold lakes. Vihren at 2,914 m is the obvious objective and a long day from the Banderitsa car park. The famous Koncheto arête is cabled, exposed, and has killed people — it is not the family option.

Story

Background

The park was declared in 1962 around Vihren, the second-highest peak in Bulgaria, and now covers a little over 40,000 hectares of the range. Its geology is the point: marble and limestone karst rather than the granite of neighbouring Rila, weathered into pale blades and towers, with more than seventy glacial lakes caught in the cirques below them — part of the roughly 118 in the range as a whole, since the park covers only some of Pirin. Two strict reserves sit inside — Bayuvi Dupki–Dzhindzhiritsa and Yulen — and in the Banderitsa valley stands the Baikushev pine, a Bosnian pine reckoned to be around thirteen hundred years old, which makes it older than the Bulgarian state.

The World Heritage boundary is worth understanding before you go. Pirin was inscribed in 1983, but the property was extended in 2010 specifically to leave the developed ski areas out of it. The slopes above Bansko that most visitors ride up are inside the national park and outside the World Heritage site, and guidebooks get this wrong constantly. UNESCO has been asking Bulgaria for a strategic environmental assessment since 2013 and for an updated management plan for longer than that; neither has arrived, and the operative plan still dates from 2004.

Walking here is serious. The park has huts at Vihren, Bezbog, Demyanitsa, Sinanitsa and Yavorov and a shelter at Tevno Lake, and the classic multi-day traverse links them. Weather moves fast over the ridges and there is very little water on the limestone.