Sunny Beach

Sunny Beach — Slanchev Bryag — occupies a shallow bay on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, immediately north of the old town of Nesebar. The beach runs about eight kilometres and behind it stands the largest concentration of hotels in the country.

It was a state project before it was a market one. Development began in 1958 as a socialist-era resort intended to earn foreign currency, planned as a complex rather than grown as a town; after 1989 it expanded enormously and largely without restraint, and the result is a resort with the density of a city and the civic structure of neither. It has a reputation for cheap package holidays and summer nightlife that is deserved and that the municipality has been trying to modify for two decades.

The beach itself is the reason any of it exists: fine golden sand, unusually wide, with a shallow gradual entry and almost no wave. The Black Sea has negligible tide, low salinity and water that reaches the mid-twenties in August, and the bay here faces east into the shelter of the Balkan foothills. It is, on its physical merits, an excellent swimming beach.

Development is total: hotels, bars, waterparks and concessions covering most of the sand, with free sections at the edges. Nesebar, at the southern end, is a UNESCO-listed peninsula of medieval churches and wooden houses, and the contrast between the two within a twenty-minute walk is the most interesting thing about visiting. Sozopol and Sinemorets further south are what this coast looks like where the state programme did not reach: an old town on a peninsula in the first case, and near-empty beaches at the Turkish border in the second.

Eight kilometres of genuinely good Black Sea swimming behind the densest hotel strip in Bulgaria, built as a state project in 1958 and expanded without restraint after 1989. Nesebar, a UNESCO peninsula of medieval churches, is twenty minutes' walk from the loudest part of it, and the contrast is the most interesting thing here.