Pirin Mountains hiking short break, Bulgaria

Planet

This walking vacation in Bulgaria’s Pirin Mountains National Park, which protects the country’s precious mountain range of the same name is, by its very nature, slow and sustainable, with guests walking on average 14km per day. The Pirin Mountains are considered of great importance for biodiversity and conservation and are, consequently, also protected by UNESCO, except for the ski resorts.

Responsible travelers can, therefore, explore a very highly protected area, where important flora includes coniferous forests of Macedonian Pine and Bosnian Pine and many species of ferns, and fauna includes brown bears, wolves and pine marten.

With all of our tours, we offer a facility for our guests to travel to or within Bulgaria using bus and train. When possible, we recommend public transport transfers on our hiking and cycling vacations but, as this is not viable on this particular tour, we use our local driver to transfer customers from place to place. However, we do ask guests to use public transport on the first day and last day to travel between Sofia and Bansko.

People

The accommodation on this vacation is a small locally owned guest house where breakfast is included. We encourage our guests to buy lunches and snacks in local shops and to have dinner either in local restaurants or back at their family-run hotel. As this vacation takes guests into some rural areas, this directs tourist spend directly into local Bulgarian’s family coffers, a world away from the mass tourism of Bulgaria’s all inclusive coastline resorts. All of our host accommodations provide picnic lunches too, paid for locally, and we work closely with them to avoid single use plastics when packaging them. We always advise our guests to bring their own reusable sealable lunch box, and refillable water bottles of course.

Directing guests to local food in the Pirin and Rila Mountains is important to us, not only so that they have an enjoyable cultural experience, but because they are also supporting the local gastro-economy. Katya, our tour manager, knows all the best places to find local specialities such as Katino meze, an appetiser made of pork or veal and vegetables cooked in a clay dish, Banski Starets the regional pork salami, or Banksa kapama, a spicy hearty mountain stew.

In addition, our daily trip notes direct guests to good local eateries. Katya also reminds guests to always practise Leave No Trace throughout their vacation.