Beaches in Bulgaria

Around four hundred kilometres of Black Sea coast, wide, sandy and shallow, with a season of about three months. The coast was developed as a state project from the 1950s to earn foreign currency and expanded rapidly and with little restraint after 1989, which is why the northern and central resorts are dense and the towns between them are not. The sea is brackish, effectively tideless, and warms to the mid-twenties in August, which makes it genuinely good swimming water. The far south towards the Turkish border holds the emptiest beaches and several protected areas. Nesebar, a UNESCO-listed medieval town on a peninsula, sits twenty minutes from the largest resort on the coast. Sozopol and Sinemorets in the south show what this coast looks like where the state programme did not reach — an old town on a peninsula in the first case, near-empty beaches at the Turkish border in the second.