Four days in Varna: the oldest worked gold on earth, and a beach ten minutes from it

Three nights in Bulgaria's sea capital, with a cave monastery in the woods and a Romanian queen's palace up the coast.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Varna
Places
10 across 4 days
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In 1972 a digger operator laying cable outside Varna turned up a grave full of gold. What came out of the ground over the following years was a necropolis from the fifth millennium BC containing more gold than the whole of the rest of the world had produced by that date, worked by people whose name we do not know. It is in a museum in the middle of town, five rooms of it, and there is rarely a queue.

The rest of Varna is a working port city with an unusually good park. The Sea Garden runs for kilometres along the cliff above the beach, full of cafes, a planetarium, an aquarium and an open air theatre, and the whole centre feeds into it through one pedestrian street.

Three nights lets you take two days out: north to a monastery cut into a limestone cliff, and up the coast to Balchik, where a Romanian queen built herself a palace and a botanical garden on a hillside above the sea in the 1920s, back when this stretch of Bulgaria was Romania.

Highlights

  • Gold objects made around 4500 BC, the oldest processed gold known anywhere
  • Aladzha, a two storey monastery carved into a cliff in the woods north of the city
  • A Romanian queen's palace at Balchik, with 250 species of cactus in the garden below it
  • A seaside park several kilometres long, one level above the sand
  • An abandoned concrete slab of a Soviet era monument, slowly coming apart above the bay

Where to stay

Varna, three nights

Stay in the old centre, between the cathedral and the entrance to the Sea Garden. Everything in this trip starts from that pedestrian street and the beach is at the bottom of it.

Avoid booking out at Golden Sands or St Constantine unless you specifically want a resort. They are twenty minutes up the coast, they are built for package tourism, and you will spend the trip commuting into the city you came to see.

Day by day

Day 1 in Varna

The cathedral, the pedestrian street and the sea garden

Varna is easy to read on the first afternoon. One large domed cathedral at the top, one pedestrian street zigzagging down from it, and a park with the sea below it at the bottom.

The cathedral is the meeting point for the whole city: people say at the cathedral the way Londoners say under the clock. The square below it is where the street performers are, and where you should also be careful, because the crowd there attracts pickpockets and men offering to change money, who are without exception cheating.

The Sea Garden is the point of the evening. It runs for several kilometres along the cliff, one level above the beach alley, and at six in the evening in summer everybody in Varna appears to be in it.

  1. 14:30

    Dormition of the Mother of God Cathedral

    Religious

    The domed cathedral in the middle of everything, finished in the 1880s after Bulgaria won its independence. Go in for the woodwork and the icons; it takes twenty minutes.

  2. 15:30

    Independence Square

    Visit

    The central square, with two small parks off it and an equestrian tsar in one of them. The pedestrian route to the sea starts here.

  3. 16:45

    Grand entrance to the Sea Garden

    Visit

    The formal gates of the seaside park, which then runs for kilometres north along the cliff. Cafes, an open air theatre, a planetarium and steps down to the sand every few hundred metres.

  4. 19:30

    Restorant Trifon Zarezan

    Eat

    Dinner on Bulgarian home cooking: shopska salad, grilled things, and a bottle of something local for the price of a coffee elsewhere.

With more time: The beach alley below the park runs the length of the city and is a better walk after dark than the park above it, because the bars along it stay open and the park does not.

Day 2 in Varna

Six thousand year old gold, then a monastery in a cliff

Go to the museum first thing and go straight to the Varna necropolis rooms. The graves were dug between roughly 4600 and 4200 BC, and one of them, grave 43, held more gold than every other known site of that period put together: a sceptre, bracelets, plaques, and gold sheathing for parts of the body it is politest not to dwell on.

What makes it extraordinary is not the quantity but what it implies. Somebody in that grave was rich and the others were not, which is one of the earliest pieces of evidence anywhere for a society with a top and a bottom.

In the afternoon go north. Aladzha is a monastery hollowed out of a limestone cliff, on two levels, with the cells and the chapel open to the air where the rock face has fallen away. It sits in a small nature park and the woods around it are cool even in August.

  1. 09:30

    Archaeological Museum

    Historic

    The Varna gold, in five rooms, plus Greek, Roman and medieval collections that would carry a museum on their own. Two hours minimum, and the labelling is good in English.

  2. 12:30

    Lunch near the museum

    Eat

    The streets between the museum and the cathedral have the everyday places where people who work in the centre eat. Look for a queue at noon.

  3. 14:15

    Aladzha Monastery

    Religious

    A medieval cave monastery cut into a cliff face on two levels, with a chapel, cells and a catacomb complex further along the rock. City bus from the centre, then a short walk through the woods.

With more time: There is a decaying concrete monument to Bulgarian and Soviet friendship on a hill on the way back into town, built in 1978 and abandoned since. The steps up are long, the structure is unsafe to enter, and the view over the bay is worth the detour.

Day 3 in Varna

Balchik: a queen's palace and a garden full of cactus

For 27 years, from 1913, this stretch of coast was Romania, and Queen Marie, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, chose a hillside above the sea at Balchik to build herself something odd and lovely: a small palace with a minaret, ten villas scattered down the slope, water channels, a chapel, and a garden running down to the water.

The garden outgrew the palace. It is now run as a botanical collection by Sofia University, it is the largest in the Balkans, and it holds a cactus collection that is said to be second in Europe only to Monaco's.

Balchik itself is a white town stacked up a chalk cliff and worth an hour of walking before the bus back. The whole day is easily done on public transport.

  1. 10:30

    Palace of Queen Mary

    Historic

    Built in 1926 for Queen Marie, part Balkan, part Ottoman, part personal fantasy, with ten villas and a chapel scattered down the hillside. Her heart was kept in the chapel here until the border moved.

  2. 12:45

    Botanical Garden

    Nature

    The largest botanical garden in the Balkans, wrapped around the palace, with 250 species of cactus and a rose alley running down to the sea. Same entrance, and you cannot really see one without the other.

  3. 15:00

    Lunch on the Balchik seafront

    Eat

    The promenade below the town is lined with fish restaurants and they are considerably better value than anything on the Varna beach alley.

  4. 16:30

    Temple of Cybele

    Religious

    A Greek temple to Cybele built between 280 and 260 BC, buried by a landslide in the 4th century AD and only found again in 2007. Small, roofed over, and remarkably intact for it.

With more time: There are mud baths and a sulphur spring along the coast east of Balchik, which locals use seriously and visitors mostly find funny. Take a towel if you are curious.

Day 4 in Varna

The navy and the fish, in the park

Both of this morning's stops are in or beside the Sea Garden, five minutes apart, which makes for an easy last few hours before a flight.

The naval museum is the better of the two and covers rather more than the Bulgarian navy: Greek wreck finds, 19th century steamers, and a yard full of guns and torpedo boats outside. Bulgaria's navy famously torpedoed an Ottoman cruiser with one small boat in 1912, and that boat is in the yard.

The aquarium next door is small, old fashioned and entirely about the Black Sea, which is more interesting than it sounds: a sea that is dead below 150 metres and full of odd survivors above it.

  1. 09:30

    Naval Museum

    Culture

    In an 1890 building at the park gates, covering war at sea from Greek wrecks to Soviet hardware, with the yard outside full of artillery and the torpedo boat Drazki.

  2. 11:15

    Varna Aquarium

    Culture

    Over 140 Black Sea species plus freshwater and exotic tanks, in a small building from the 1930s. Half an hour, and good with children.

With more time: With longer, the Bulgarian Revival house holding the ethnographic collection is ten minutes inland and shows how a Varna merchant family lived in the 1860s.

Before you go

Getting in

Varna airport takes flights from more than 80 destinations, heavily seasonal and mostly charter and low cost. Bus line 409 runs from the airport into the centre and on to the resorts; take small notes for the ticket machine.

From Sofia there are two flights a day in summer, a night train, and buses taking around 7 hours. From Plovdiv, buses are the practical option. The rail line to the coast is slow and loops inland.

Getting around

The old centre, the cathedral, the museums and the Sea Garden are all walkable, connected by a pedestrian zone that runs from the cathedral square down to the park gates. The railway station is ten minutes from that street and the bus station about twenty five.

For Aladzha and the resorts, city buses run north along the coast. For Balchik, buses leave from the bus station roughly hourly and take about 50 minutes.

When to go

June and September. July and August fill the coast with package holidays and the resort strip north of the city becomes something you would rather not drive through; the sea is warm well into October.

Out of season, from November to April, Varna is a normal Bulgarian city with the seafront shut. The museums stay open and it is very cheap, but the beach is not the point then.

Varna gets treated as an airport with a beach attached, and it deserves better. A grave dug six and a half thousand years ago on this shore contains the earliest gold anybody has ever made, and it is sitting in a quiet museum ten minutes from the sand.

Three nights, a day north to Aladzha and a day at Balchik, and stay in the city rather than the resorts.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Varna just a beach city?
No, though the resorts either side of it are. The city itself has the best archaeological museum in Bulgaria, a serious park, a working port and a cave monastery half an hour north. The beach is a bonus rather than the reason.
Should I stay in Varna or at Golden Sands?
Varna, unless you have specifically come for a resort holiday. The city centre has the museums, the restaurants and the park, and buses run up the coast if you want the bigger beaches for an afternoon. The reverse commute wastes the trip.
How do I get to Balchik?
Buses from Varna bus station take about 50 minutes and run through the day. The palace and garden are a walk or a short taxi from the Balchik bus stop, down at the seafront rather than up in the town.
Is the Varna gold really the oldest?
It is the oldest processed gold found anywhere, made between roughly 4600 and 4200 BC, which puts it well before the Egyptian and Mesopotamian material most people assume came first. About six kilograms of it came out of one necropolis on the edge of the modern city.