Rusenski Lom Nature Park

Worth a detour

The Lom is the Danube's last significant right tributary, and it meanders through soft limestone in a canyon deep enough that people have been carving into the sides of it for a thousand years: the rock churches at Ivanovo, the medieval town at Cherven, the cave monastery at Basarbovo. The cliffs are also one of the better raptor places in the country. Egyptian vulture, golden eagle and eagle owl all nest here.

Story

Background

The Danube plain is limestone laid down when this was the floor of a sea, and the rivers running off the Balkan range have cut into it rather than across it. The result at the Lom is a set of tight meanders with vertical sides, hollow with caves and ledges. The park takes in the valleys of the Beli, Cherni and Baniski Lom, about forty-two kilometres of river in all. It was declared in 1970 and reached its present boundaries in 1989.

The vegetation is forest-steppe — the transition between the woods of western Europe and the steppe of the east — and the park is one of the last places on the Danube plain where that survives more or less intact. Over seven hundred higher plants have been recorded in the meadows alone. The fauna is the unexpected part: twenty-two fish in the river, nineteen reptiles including Bulgaria's only gecko, and enough breeding raptors and butterflies that the valley is listed as important for both.

The practical shape of a visit is a drive. Nothing is more than a short walk from a road, but the sites are scattered along twenty-odd kilometres of valley and there is no single entrance. The park administration keeps an office in Ruse on bul. Skobelev, open on weekdays, and runs a study centre in the valley itself.