Rosenets Park (Otmanli)

Worth a detour

Fifteen kilometres south of Burgas and nineteen north of Sozopol, on the northernmost spur of Strandzha, is a stretch of unimproved oak woodland that the city has used for generations: paths, gazebos, barbecue places, holiday cabins under the trees, and at the bottom of it a small beach looking straight out at St Anastasia island. It costs nothing and most visitors to the coast have never heard of it.

Story

Background

Rosenets, which older people call Otmanli, is not a park in the municipal sense. It is a piece of coastal forest with tracks through it and picnic furniture in the clearings, sitting between the sea and the ridge, and it has stayed that way because the land around it is oil terminal and nobody has been able to build on it.

The beach at the foot of it is small, backed by rock, and has the best framed view of St Anastasia on the whole coast — the island sits directly offshore. There is one place to eat. In July the beach fills up with people from Burgas; the woods above it do not.

What to do with it: bring food, take one of the criss-crossing paths inland for half an hour until the traffic noise stops, come back down for a swim, and eat at a table under the oaks. It is the standard Burgas Sunday and it works. Getting there means the Atia turning off the Sozopol road rather than the main carriageway, and the signs use both names. For anyone with a car and a spare afternoon who has had enough of sunbeds, this and Chengene Skele on the next headland are the two best free things south of the city.