Rila Mountains hiking vacation in Bulgaria

Planet

This walking vacation in Bulgaria’s Rila 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 Rila Mountains are considered of great importance for biodiversity and conservation, and certain sections of them are recognised as wilderness, as defined by the European Wilderness Network. This means that “they are unmodified or only slightly modified and without intrusive or extractive human activity, settlements, infrastructure or visual disturbance.”

The natural resources that need to be protected, and which our guests get to explore on their walking vacation, include old growth mixed forest, alpine meadows, deep canyons, gorges and waterfalls, all providing habitats for elusive wolves and bears and important bird species such as capercaillie, hazel grouse and eagles.

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.

People

The accommodation on this vacation is a small locally owned guest house where breakfast and dinners are included. We encourage our guests to buy lunches and snacks in local shops. As this vacation takes guests into some pretty 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 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 banitsa filo pastry and cheese pies, bob chorba bean soup or shkembe chorba soup made with tripe, garlic, vinegar and chilli. 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.