Cheap, but cheerful?
Fred Mawer finds you can dodge Bulgaria’s high-rise hotels and brash bars – if you know where to look...
Given its name, you would have thought that the appeal of Sunny Beach would rest chiefly with its fine weather and golden sands. But the Bulgarian Black Sea resort has an even bigger selling point: it has a reputation for being really cheap.
According to research, a selection of ten tourist staples – including meals, drinks and sun cream – bought in Sunny Beach costs just over €42, compared to €66 in the Algarve, and €149 in Ibiza, Europe’s priciest resort.
So, should we all be heading to Sunny Beach this summer instead of more familiar hotspots in Portugal, Spain and Greece? I spent a few days in Sunny Beach to find out just how cheap it is – and whether it is cheerful, too.
It’s true: the prices are so low they do make you cheerful. A half litre (nearly a pint) of draft local beer can be found for under €1, and ten shots of tequila cost around €7.50.
Many bars confusingly offer so-called happy hours around the clock, with twofor-one drinks. (Less happily, to use the loo in most bars you need to pay 1 lev – about 50c.)
Eating also brings a penny-pinching smile to your face. A banitsa – a delicious, flaky cheese pastry – bought from a bakery cost 30c. A cone of ice cream was 85c.
For lunch in a pleasant beachfront cafe, my classic Bulgarian shopska salad – a big bowl of chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and feta – cost just under €3.50. I asked around for the best restaurant in Sunny Beach. The consensus was Djanny, an elegant spot away from the beach, which was mostly full with locals.
I ate like a prince – various dips to start, chicken as a main course, cake and ice cream, and two beers – and the bill came to only €14.
But beyond the prices, is there any cheer in Sunny Beach?
The resort is a vast, purposebuilt concrete jungle dating from communist-era days, with more than 200 hotels. There is little ongoing building work and key areas, including the beachfront promenade, are pedestrianised, but no one could call it attractive.
The Blue Flag beach has its merits. I saw its five miles of soft sand being sieved clean each evening; lifeguards are stationed every hundred yards or so; and there are some appealing beach bars, decked out with primary-coloured bean bags and hammocks.
The beach has one glaring drawback, however. For most of its length, it is almost completely covered with closely packed rows of sunbeds, though they are – yes, you’ve guessed it – cheap to rent, at €4 a day.
In some respects, Sunny Beach has much in common with the big resorts on the Spanish costas. You are never far from a crazy golf venue or McDonald’s, and most cafés, bars and restaurants offer full English breakfasts and live football on big screens.
Yet the resort feels more exotic than its western European counterparts. Everything is written in
the Cyrillic alphabet as well as English; people sit around in bars smoking hookahs; and young and old whizz around the resort on electric, three-wheeled scooters (€10 an hour to hire).
Less welcome are pushy types trying to get you to pose for photographs with parrots, snakes and
Aiguanas, and the many intrusively placed sex shops. T night, Flower Street, Sunny Beach’s neon heart, becomes the Wild East. People harassed me to visit strip joints, and tried to sell me balloons filled with laughing gas to take in to clubs.
In one establishment, I spotted girls dancing on a bar with lit fireworks sticking out of their bikinis. Such raucous goings-on have been graphically documented on the Channel 4 show What Happens In Sunny Beach.
However, a holiday here doesn’t have to revolve around boozesoaked partying. Many more casual bars and restaurants lay on live music every night – I can recommend the spirited Elvis impersonator at The Fat Cat.
And the Djanny restaurant was perfectly civilised – until a stag group appeared, including the groom-to-be dressed in a pink Batman outfit.
There’s also more to Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast than Sunny Beach. A 80c bus ride from the resort brings you to old Nessebar, a peninsula of cobbled streets, wooden merchants’ houses and frescoed Byzantine churches.
The Unesco World Heritage site is also known for its excellent fish restaurants. On the fig tree-shaded terrace of Plakamoto, I tucked into a plateful of tasty Black Sea scad, very reasonably priced at €7.
If, like me, your hard partying years are long behind you, Nessebar is likely to be much more your kind of place.
As for Sunny Beach itself, it is certainly cheap. Before booking a break there, just bear in mind that it’s big, brash and sometimes raucous – certainly not what everyone would describe as cheerful.