Skigebiete in Bulgaria

Bulgarian skiing is compact, cheap and better than its reputation. Bansko in the Pirin mountains is the flagship: a gondola from the town takes you up to a ski area between roughly 1,600 and 2,600 m, with a 16 km descent back down the gondola line and tree skiing that comes into its own after a storm. Borovets in the Rila range is the oldest resort, with long tree lined runs off Yastrebets and a World Cup racing history. Pamporovo in the Rhodopes is the gentle one, sunny, pine covered and aimed squarely at beginners.

The value equation is the reason most people come. Lift passes run at roughly half Alpine prices, lessons and hire cost a fraction, and package deals bundle everything with accommodation and food. Instruction is in English as standard and the ski schools are used to complete beginners. The trade off is queueing: Bansko's single main gondola creates a morning bottleneck at peak weeks, though a second lift and continued investment have eased it.

Advanced skiers will exhaust the marked terrain quickly, but the Pirin and Rila ranges have serious ski touring and the freeride around Bansko and Todorka is worthwhile with a guide. Off the slopes, the mineral spas at Bansko, Sandanski and Velingrad are genuinely good and inexpensive, snowshoe walks run into the Pirin National Park, and the Rila Monastery, a UNESCO site with its striped arcades and frescoes, is a straightforward day trip from Borovets.

Bulgarian mountain food is Balkan, generous and very cheap. The mehana, a traditional tavern with wooden benches and live folk music, is where you eat: start with shopska salad of tomato, cucumber and grated sirene cheese, then a clay pot dish such as kavarma, slow cooked pork or chicken with peppers and onions, or gyuvech. Banitsa, filo pastry layered with cheese and eggs, is the breakfast and the snack.

Grilled meat is the centrepiece: kebapche and kyufte off the charcoal, pork skewers, and lamb in the Rhodope villages. Bob chorba, bean soup, and shkembe chorba, tripe soup, are the winter warmers, and the yoghurt is genuinely different here, made with the Lactobacillus bulgaricus strain that takes its name from the country. Bansko has its own cured meat, the Bansko starets, and a sausage tradition worth ordering.

Rakia, the fruit brandy usually made from grapes or plums, is drunk with the salad at the start of the meal rather than at the end, and homemade versions are strong. Bulgarian wine is undervalued: look for Mavrud and Melnik reds, the latter grown near Sandanski just south of Bansko. Après ski in Bansko is loud, cheap and dominated by a strip of bars, and the folk music mehana with a band and rakia is the more memorable version of the evening.

Borovets is the oldest Bulgarian resort, developed from a royal hunting retreat established for Prince Ferdinand in the 1890s, and it hosted men's Alpine World Cup races in the early 1980s, including downhill and giant slalom on the Yastrebets slopes. Bansko joined the World Cup circuit much later, hosting men's and women's races on the Tomba piste from 2009 onwards.

Bansko the town predates the ski area by centuries and was a centre of the Bulgarian National Revival, the eighteenth and nineteenth century cultural movement that preceded independence from Ottoman rule. Neofit Rilski, the monk and educator regarded as a founder of modern Bulgarian secular education, was born there, and the old quarter's stone houses with their high walled courtyards are from that period.

The Rila Monastery, founded in the tenth century and rebuilt in the nineteenth after a fire, is the most significant cultural monument in the country and sits within reach of both Borovets and Bansko. Bulgaria's skiing sits inside two national parks, Pirin and Rila, and the tension between resort expansion and UNESCO protected status in the Pirin has been a live political argument for the past two decades.