Vitosha nature park

Worth a detour

Declared in 1934, which makes it the oldest park of its kind on the peninsula, and now 27,079 hectares of mountain beginning where the city's last bus stops. It is also the most visited protected area in Bulgaria, so it is not wilderness. Come on a weekday if you want it quiet, and read the reserve rules before you walk — one of the two is entirely off-limits.

Story

Background

The push came from the Union for the Protection of Native Nature. A forestry council protocol of 2 February 1933 and a ministerial decree the following year created a national park of 6,410 hectares in three parts: a conifer reserve of 759.9 hectares, a peat reserve of 166 hectares, and the rest. In the same decade the state built the road from Dragalevtsi up to Aleko, cut twenty-two kilometres of paths, marked a ski route from Cherni Vrah, put out benches for five hundred people and built nine huts. Modern Bulgarian outdoor recreation was largely invented here, deliberately, by administrators.

The boundaries then moved for sixty years, shrinking to accommodate grazing, expanding again under later decrees, and reaching the present 27,079 hectares in February 1991.

The two reserves are worth understanding. Bistrishko Branishte, on the eastern slope, protects old spruce and can be crossed on marked paths. Torfeno Branishte, declared in 1935 and now 784 hectares of peat bog at around 1,800 metres, is closed completely: the peat is between 0.6 and 2 metres deep, a thousand to fifteen hundred years old, grows about a millimetre a year, holds over three hundred mosses and five hundred algae, and acts as the sponge that supplies the city's water. Despite the ski runs and the traffic, the park still carries 138 endemic invertebrate species and eighty-five relict ones, eighteen of them arctic-alpine survivors of the last glaciation.