Pirin

Worth a detour

Rila is higher; Pirin is steeper. Eighty kilometres of ridge running north to south, with the two highest summits — Vihren at 2,914 m and Kutelo just behind it — packed into the northern end, where the rock turns to marble and the walls go nearly vertical. Most of the range is national park, on the World Heritage list since 1983. Bansko is the usual base. The marble is karst: it swallows water, and long stretches of the high ridge have no springs.

Story

Background

Pirin runs about eighty kilometres from the Predel saddle in the north, where it meets Rila, down towards the Greek border, and it is narrow — forty kilometres at the widest, often far less. The northern third is the part people mean when they say Pirin. Here the granite gives way to a band of marble, and marble weathers into the shapes that make the range look, from Bansko, more like a small alpine chain than anything else in the country: knife ridges, screes of white gravel, walls that drop several hundred metres without a ledge.

The national park covers most of the high ground and has been a World Heritage site since 1983, with an extension added in 2010. It holds around 118 glacial lakes, of which Popovo, in the middle of the range, is the largest and deepest. Two areas were deliberately left outside the inscription: the ski zones above Bansko and Dobrinishte. Those exclusions have been the subject of a long argument between the Bulgarian state, conservation groups and the World Heritage Committee, which has repeatedly asked for lift development to be reined in. You see the evidence of it on the drive up.

The practical consequence of all that marble is dryness. Karst takes rain straight down, and on the high crests between the huts there can be nothing to drink for hours. Fill up at the hut, and treat any summer afternoon above 2,500 m as likely to end in a storm.