THE ULTIMATE BARGAIN BEACH
And you’ll never guess where it is
Sunny Beach has just been declared Europe’s most affordable seaside holiday. So is it cheap AND cheerful... or a deal too far?
OFCOURSE it’s pouring with rain on arrival at Bulgaria’s sunny Beach. calling a holiday resort ‘sunny’ is the meteorological equivalent of ‘happy Valley’ or ‘Lake Placid’, the kind of names that provoke grim death. And the town is not set up for rain, which gathers in great pools by the side of the road.
hopefully, it will brighten up before sunny Beach’s roughly 800 hotels prepare to welcome the annual army of tourists who will arrive from next month. Last week, it was announced that the resort, which lies on Bulgaria’s Black sea coast, near Burgas and Varna, offers the cheapest sunny holiday in Europe for British travellers.
A study of 20 resorts by Post office travel Money found that prices in sunny Beach are a third lower than in the Algarve, Portugal, its nearest rival.
Bottom of the table was sorrento, the smart resort on the Bay of Naples in southern italy. the report said that prices had dropped more than 10 per cent in the past year, mainly as a result of competitive pricing.
the more lively the town in the summer, the more melancholy it is out of season, and in high summer they don’t come more energetic than sunny Beach. things kick off when the
charter flights begin in May, and build to a high pitch between June and September.
The main drag, Flower Street, becomes a raging party spot, full of teenagers, stag dos, hen parties and sundry other young people, drawn by sun, sand and the prospect of getting leathered for less than the price of a single craft beer back home.
Meanwhile, in the large allinclusive resorts along the seafront, families can sprawl by the pool for a fraction of the cost of comparable destinations in Spain or Portugal.
Even somewhere like Torremolinos, which in other ways is comparable to Sunny Beach, cannot begin to compete on price. The calm Black Sea makes for easy swimming, while the gently curving shoreline has room for thousands of loungers.
All this fun has not gone unnoticed. In 2014, Channel 4 aired the first episode of What Happens In Sunny Beach, which ran for two series and exposed the antics of guests and staff. Not all of it was family viewing. The following year, BBC Three’s one-woman fun police, Stacey Dooley, featured Sunny Beach in an episode of The Truth About, entitled Booze, Bar Crawls & Bulgaria.
NOBODY would deny that there is an underbelly to Sunny Beach. How seedy you find that underbelly depends on your interests.
Stories about drugs and sex abound. There is a small casino attached to my hotel. Bulgaria’s legalised gambling draws tourists, in particular from Turkey and Israel, where it is highly regulated. Next to the casino is a sex shop. Garish and puzzling toys peer out through the drizzle.
It wasn’t always like this. A man called Nicola explains that Sunny Beach began life in the 1950s as a resort for well-heeled elites in the Soviet Union.
‘Back then it was a lovely spot, with a few hotels nestled in the woods along the beach,’ he
explains. It was after the advent of democracy, in the 1990s, that a building boom began, with developers throwing up large, functional resorts designed to pack in as many package tourists as possible, with the result that Sunny Beach will not be winning any architecture awards any time soon.
Tourists from Britain and the rest of Europe started coming in larger numbers after Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, since when its reputation as an anything- goes paradise has steadily grown.
Nicola’s assessment of the contemporary Sunny Beach is less favourable. ‘There are so many more beautiful parts of Bulgaria to see, especially in the mountains,’ he says.
‘Sunny Beach is girls, gambling and alcohol, but if people want to come, what can we do?’
Two years ago, the country’s then deputy prime minister, Valeri Simeonov, tried to crack down on some of the less salubrious businesses in the hope of attracting ‘more solvent’ tourists. To judge by the mix of businesses, it doesn’t seem to
have worked. sunny beach is astonishingly cheap.
at the Kondor bar, i glug bottles of local lager, Kamenitza, for 88p a pop. i speak to two of the town’s year-round british residents, Gav and Mark, who are keeping half an eye on the football. both work in lettings. ‘it’ll be as busy as ever this year,’ Gav explains. He’s not worried about any dampening effect from brexit.
‘People have already booked their holidays and they still want to get away. You have the weather, the beach and the prices are just…’ he adds, gesturing at his beer.
round the corner at djanny’s, by consensus the best restaurant in town, i have a glutton’s jamboree: bread covered in molten cheese, a shopska salad of cheese, tomatoes and cucumber, a pork skewer straight out of Game of Thrones, a chocolate brownie with ice cream and three more beers. The total price is £20.
WADDLING
over to my hotel like a Perigord goose, i start to see the place’s appeal.
The next day i head back to the beach. in summer, the sand is scaled with white loungers, but today it is empty and stretches off appealingly in both directions, wide and golden.
i can see why those old soviets decided to pitch up here. at last, light pokes through the bluish clouds and sunny beach, briefly, lives up to its name.