by If you ever want to experience a time warp, visit Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. The 1960s beach hotels are everything you’d expect from properties built in the Soviet era and not updated since.
Although my three-star hotel room is quite pleasant and I can drift off to sleep to the sound of the waves, it is a space that lacks much attention to interior design. But what it lacks in up-to-date style, it more than makes up for in value for money.
While budget resorts elsewhere in Europe – Mallorca’s Magaluf, say, or Faliraki in Rhodes – have tried to upgrade from their supermarket roots, Bulgaria’s sun and sand offering remains unashamedly cheap and delightful.
I am in Nessebar, about half an hour’s drive from the airport at Burgas (and ten minutes from rowdier Sunny Beach), and my room facing the sea, with breakfast, cost me £50 per night.
OK, so maybe it’s not all that sophisticated, but does it really matter when apricot sand is out in the open and I’m 15 minutes away from Old Nessebar: a walled World Heritage City that, although she is touristy, absolutely. is charming?
Either way, I didn’t come to Bulgaria for fancy hotels and five-star service. I’m here because – beyond an affordable beach holiday – the Black Sea Coast offers excellent birding.
As well as being extremely biodiverse in itself, the region is a sharp point on the Via Pontica, one of Europe’s great migration routes. In spring and autumn, birds of all kinds pass through in their thousands as they travel between their summer and winter ranges.
And what are the birds. At peak migration times, pelicans, storks and eagles will soar high over the thermals, while others – turtle doves, nightingales, red-footed falcons – pass through at less high altitudes.
Add in an impressive roster of breeding species from colorful rollers and golden orioles to regional specialties like hummingbirds and it’s no wonder Bulgaria is so loved by visiting bird watchers.
To maximize bird encounters, I have hired a birding guide for the day. As the founder of the Bulgarian Association for the Protection of Birds and one of Bulgaria’s leading ornithologists, no one is more qualified than Petar Iankov.
As we leave Nessebar on a May morning, Petar explains why Burgas is so big for birds. “The most important thing here is the complex of lakes around Burgas,” he reveals, “which itself is at the westernmost point of the Black Sea.
“The four main lakes vary between saline, brackish and freshwater habitats, and each is surrounded by landscapes that provide opportunities for birds to breed, winter or pause on their journey from Africa and the Mediterranean to Poland, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.”
Our first stop is Pomorie Lake salanda. As we get out of the car, we enjoy the calls of Sandwich, small and common terns as the males try to impress their potential mates with gifts of silver fish.
Avocets and black terns are taking a quieter approach to the nesting season, with many birds already hatching. We admired a group of rusty cormorants whose wings were held out to dry: so much smaller and more reptilian than their familiar cousins I know from home.
With a lot of ground to cover, we soon move on to Lake Atanasovsko: another salty body of water but with different birds. The stars of the show here are flounder as they stand tall with their heads dipped, sifting the water for shrimp. They look faintly faint until they party and fly away on crimson wings, their long pink legs trailing behind.
We stop for a picnic at the far end of the lake, where cuckoos call and energetic beekeepers eat their name. As we watch the comings and goings of the birds, Petar tells me more about Bulgaria’s rich wildlife. “One of the few good things that came out of half a century of communist rule was that technology didn’t move as fast as in Western Europe,” he explains.
“If our old-growth forests were harder to come by in Germany, for example, they would have been felled after the war, and our birds would have been destroyed by agricultural chemicals. So as bird watchers from abroad started coming to Bulgaria when the Iron Curtain fell, they were very surprised by the number of wild birds we have.”
As if to emphasize his point, a medium-sized songbird chooses that moment to perch near a fence post. It’s a red-backed warbler: once common in the British countryside, but a species whose disappearance from our island has been blamed on pesticides.
To mix things up, we take a post-lunch visit to an area of lark-rich steppe, through villages with a stork’s nest atop each lamp post. At a disused quarry, Petar makes a determined (but unsuccessful) attempt to lure the local bald eagle into view by imitating its call. And at Aquae Calidae, famous since then for its health-promoting hot springs, we fill our bottles with mineral water before heading back to the lakes.
Brackish Lake Burgas adds pelicans, ravens and black terns to our tally before we end at the PODA Nature Reserve, where the last lake, Mandrensko, meets the sea. Although only one square kilometre, this patch of scrub, reeds and open water has seen 315 bird species: around a quarter of Europe’s birdlife.
From the visitor center, we watch billed spoonbills and ibises carrying food to their nests, and the tern colony goes wild every time a harrier of prey glides by. It is a wonderful sight, full of energy and life; but only a handful of other people are here to see this avian spectacle.
“Bulgarians are pragmatic,” Petar explains. “Poultry is not very popular around the country because it has no specific purpose.”
But an appreciation of nature is essential for its preservation.
“Bulgaria’s biodiversity has been eroded since The Changes [post-communism],” he admits. “It is important that the local people see the value that nature-based tourism brings to our countryside; we just need more visitors to experience it.”
How to do it
Jet2 flies to Burgas from nine UK airports including Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester and London Stansted. Seven nights’ B&B at Nessebar’s Beachfront Mirage Hotel costs from £619pp in September, including flights and transfers.
A guided birding day with Petar Iankov costs around £85 (contact via poda@bspb.org). For birding and photography day trips, also from £85, try Nature Monitoring. April/May and August/September are the main migration months.
