Dear International Living Reader,
It’s not just the cheap beer, disco beat, and ample golden beaches that have made Bulgaria’s seaside resorts the new package holiday hot-spot for Europe’s masses. For the Brits, there’s familiar food such as bacon sandwiches and chicken curry…and English is spoken everywhere. Even so, it’s not only Brits and Irish coming here in great number. Golden Sands and Sunny Beach (Bulgaria’s two largest resorts) are a multinational melting-pot of Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Greeks, Czechs, Russians, and Hungarians.
Incidentally, nobody here calls the main resorts by their respective Bulgarian names of Zlatni Pyasutsi and Slanchev Bryag. If you’re an English-speaker, they’re Golden Sands and Sunny Beach. Germans seem equally reluctant to speak even one word of Bulgarian–they call them ‘Goldstrand’ and ‘Sonnenstrand.’
Despite new five-star hotels and the cleanliness of both streets and beaches, neither resort is posh. It will take very clever marketing to sell most of the resorts here as middle-class vacation spots. I seem to be the only visitor who’s even bought a guidebook to Bulgaria. Like in communist times, these are holiday destinations for the workers. Since Europe’s proletariat is finding it increasingly difficult to afford two weeks in Spain, Bulgaria’s Black Sea Riviera is rapidly becoming the cheap destination of choice.
Although some of the infrastructure leaves a lot to be desired (where are the supermarkets?), many foreign visitors are buying property too. At the moment, brand-new apartments are mostly fetching $90 to $120 per square foot. That’s in the resorts. In the seaside city of Varna–12 miles down the road from Golden Sands–newly-built apartments in decent areas start at around $56 per square foot. With Bulgaria expected to join the EU in 2007, prices for coastal property have nowhere to go but up. Don’t leave it too late to come and have a look.
As Golden Sands is backed by a National Park, there are few opportunities here for developers, but it’s a different story at pancake-flat Sunny Beach with its five-mile stretch of sand and smaller neighboring resorts such as Sveti Vlas. New apartments and new hotels are springing up wherever you look. One agent told me she believes Bulgaria’s entire Black Sea coast will eventually be developed. Thankfully, there was no construction work during my visit. Due to numerous complaints from early season holiday-makers, building work is now banned from June until October.
Steenie Harvey
Roving Editor, International Living
P.S. With more and more foreigners buying, resort life may eventually change and become more like expat communities in Spain. But at the moment, Golden Sands and Sunny Beach are purely summer-time destinations. Although a handful of foreign buyers have bought with an aim to permanent living, they’re likely to feel pretty isolated in winter. Come October, everywhere shuts down. Bulgarians don’t live in the resorts at all–workers in the tourism trade commute from nearby cities such as Varna and Bourgas. If you were looking to live year-round on the Black Sea coast, Varna would be the most attractive option.
