Just outside Varna, on the old Devnya road which passes the airport, there is the geological wonder known as the ‘Stone Forest’. On either side of the old A2 road heading west out of Varna, around 18km outside the city, you will see scrub land with large pillars of stone standing upright. These strange rock formations were formed over fifty million years ago when two chalk strata of the earth’s crust fused together and pushed up these stone columns. There are hundreds of them, some just a couple of feet tall, some standing as high as two or three metres. As use approach the site along the road, par

While staying in Varna for a few days we visited the ruins of Aladzha Monastery and Catacombs, half way between Varna and Golden Sands. These caves, set high into a cliff are thought to first have been occupied in the Stone Ages by ‘pygmies’ and then possibly gave shelter to others during the Dark Ages. The monastery that now occupies the site was probably built in the thirteenth century. The entrance fee is 6 levs for an adult and 2 levs for a child and includes entry to the Monastery ruins, the catacombs and the small museum. The museum houses a few artefacts found around Varna and some mosaics and has a

Now back in Bulgaria for the summer, we decided to head to the Black Sea Coast for a few days. We had a house to visit and a garden to clear around Yambol, so once that job was completed we carried on to the coast and headed for Sozopol. According to the guide books and my personal experience from two or three years back, finding accommodation in the months of July and August in the resorts a long the coast can be difficult, and finding a room to rent or a hotel bed in the old towns, near impossible. Yet we drove into the old part of Sozopol, parked without problem and walked into the narrow streets of t

After protracted talks and court cases, the Bulgarian government has decided that the tourist holiday village Zlatna Perla (Golden Pearl) will be town down and bull dozed. Although the large complex was never actually completed, most of the units were sold off-plan to foreigners, with at least 90 British and Irish investors being caught up in the scandal. In fact the RightMoveAbroad are still advertising the complex as a fantastic new development that is all sold out – to foreign investors that have now lost all the money they put into the development. Previously the people who had bought into the developmen

Bansko continues to experience problems with planning issues and ownership issues. Back at the beginning of March, a group of investors who have collectively spent millions on a development in Bansko, decided to hold a peaceful protest outside the Four Seasons developments, where they have bought apartments but are being refused access due to ownership issues. The group of investors feel they have been conned out of their property. They initially purchased the Bulgarian property through Rockarch Estates in London, but the agency claim that it was then defrauded by their Bulgarian business partner who transferr

2009 was a disastrous year in terms of the Bulgarian property market. Property prices dropped on average by over 30% and a 40% decrease in the number of real estate deals finalised. The cities and towns that suffered the most were Bansko and Sunny Beach which both saw around a 40% decrease in property prices and rural Bulgarian property prices saw a massive decrease as well in regions such as Veliko Turnovo and surrounding villages, Montana, Kardzhali and Yambol. However, despite the downturn in the Bulgarian property market buyers were still keeping a close eye on the property market there and bargain prices

Last year (2009) was the worst in the history of the fairly young Bulgarian property market. After the massive boom in prices and number of investors through from 2004 to 2007 or so, where property prices increased at between 10 and 37% a year in some areas, the first half of 2009 saw absolutely no movement in the property market and then a sharp drop in real estate prices in many of the main cities and resorts. In Sofia, where the property market is more developed than in other areas of Bulgaria and thus more flexible, prices in Euros per square metre dropped from just above 1,000 E/sqm to under 950 E/sqm in

Would you buy a property if you had to hack your way through over grown vines, nettles and weeds just to get to the front door and then wait around for 20 minutes while the agent struggled with a rusty old lock, before being thrust into a room full of cobwebs, spiders, other horrid creepy crawlies and jars of undistinguishable matter and empty beer and vodka bottles? It would certainly leave an impression on you, but the right impression? Yet many people are still trying to sell an old abandoned Bulgarian village house that has not had the garden touched in years and is in the same state it was when the old in

I am currently doing a lot of promotion for TheTravelBug website and have taken on someone to try and get the website better positions in the main search engines. He is doing a lot of directory submissions, article submissions, social website marketing and so on. And as part of this promotional campaign I was checking my links page to make sure that all those listed had reciprocal links back to TheTravelBug and found that many of the real estate agents that I had exchanged links with in the past, no longer existed. Their domain name did not work or just redirected to a holding page or the registrar for the domain

'A Place In The Sun' has published its annual best top ten places in the world to buy property based on property prices, climate and weather, infrastructure, rentals and how popular the destination is. The top spot this year surprising went to Spain and the Canary Islands, mainly due to the massive discounts currently available on holiday home due to the recession. Whilst you might be able to pick up an apartment in Marbella for under hundred thousand Euros nowadays, Spain has suffered some of the worst problems ever reported with builders, developers going bust and problems with planning permissions. Many hav