Trigrad Gorge

Worth a detour

Two marble walls three hundred metres high, about a hundred metres apart at the narrowest, and a single-lane road cut into the rock between them — the most dramatic few kilometres of driving in the Rhodopes. At the bottom the Trigradska river leaves the surface entirely, dropping into the Devil's Throat and re-emerging half a kilometre downstream. Go slowly: the bends are blind and coaches use the same road.

Story

Background

The gorge is cut through Proterozoic marble by the Trigradska river, and the shape gives the mechanism away: not a valley but a slot, walls rising three hundred metres and more on both sides, roughly three hundred metres apart where it begins and narrowing to something like a hundred. The whole feature runs a few kilometres, with the spectacular part shorter than that. The road through it is the only link between Trigrad village and Devin, blasted into the rock face — one lane in places, with short tunnels and a drop on the outside.

The river does something unusual at the foot of the highest cliff. It leaves the surface, falling into the Devil's Throat cave, and comes back 530 metres further down the valley, underground the whole way.

The area has been protected since the early 1960s and managed for visitors since 1977, and it still does not feel packaged — no barrier, no viewing platform, just the road and a couple of lay-bys. Climbers work the walls and birdwatchers come for the raptors. This is high country, around 1,450 metres, colder than the plain by a long way, and in winter the shaded sections ice over and hold snow late.