Bulgaria

Bulgaria is a country in Europe.

The big Danube River runs along its top. The Black Sea is on its side. Tall mountains cross the middle. The capital city is called Sofia.

Bulgaria is a country in southeastern Europe, on the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula. On a map it is almost a rectangle. The Danube River forms most of its northern border, and the Black Sea lies to the east.

Inside that rectangle, flat farmland and rugged mountains take turns. The Balkan Mountains run across the middle, and higher mountains rise in the south. The capital, Sofia, sits in a mountain basin in the west. Bulgaria was founded in the year 681, which makes it one of the oldest countries in Europe. About 6.4 million people lived there at the end of 2025.

Bulgaria lies on the eastern Balkan Peninsula, crossed by historic routes from northern and eastern Europe to the Mediterranean and from western Europe to the Middle East. Britannica describes it as nearly rectangular: Romania to the north along most of the lower Danube, the Black Sea to the east, Türkiye (Turkey) and Greece to the south, North Macedonia to the southwest and Serbia to the west.

Three structural divisions run east to west: North Bulgaria, with the Danubian Plain and the Balkan Mountains; a transitional zone of block-faulted ranges and basins, including the Sofia basin and the Upper Thracian lowland; and South Bulgaria, dominated by the Rila-Rhodope Massif. The National Statistical Institute (NSI) counted 6,423,207 residents on December 31, 2025. Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007, and the European Central Bank records that it joined the euro area on January 1, 2026.

Sofia is the biggest city in Bulgaria.

A big mountain called Vitosha stands right behind it. Plovdiv is an old city by a river. High in the mountains is Rila Monastery, with striped arches and painted walls.

Sofia, the capital, has more than a million people, about three times as many as the next biggest cities, Plovdiv and Varna. The Vitosha mountains rise just outside it. Plovdiv sits on the Maritsa River in the south, where ruins of Roman towns have been dug up.

On the Black Sea, the town of Nessebar stands on a rocky peninsula. It is more than 3,000 years old: it began as a Thracian settlement and became a Greek colony around 600 BCE. In the Rila Mountains, Rila Monastery was founded in the 900s and rebuilt between 1834 and 1862 after a fire. Both are World Heritage Sites.

Sofia, in a mountainous basin in the west, dominates Bulgaria's economic and cultural life and has about three times the population of Plovdiv or Varna; Wikidata gives 1,213,134 (2025). Plovdiv, on the Maritsa, is an industrial and cultural center with an international trade fair; Varna and Burgas have the coast's fine harbors, Burgas being the largest Black Sea port, and Ruse is the largest river port.

UNESCO inscribed Nessebar in 1983: a site more than 3,000 years old on a rocky peninsula, first a Thracian settlement, a Greek colony from the early 6th century BCE, and later one of the main Byzantine towns of the western Black Sea coast, with 19th-century wooden houses typical of the region. Rila Monastery (1983), founded in the 10th century by the hermit John of Rila, burned in the early 19th century and was rebuilt in 1834–62; UNESCO calls it a characteristic example of the Bulgarian Renaissance of the 18th–19th centuries. The Thracian tomb of Kazanlak (1979), from around the end of the 4th century BCE, holds Bulgaria's best-preserved Hellenistic paintings.

Bulgaria has many mountains.

The tallest is called Musala. High up there are hundreds of small lakes. Warm water bubbles out of the ground in many places. The beaches by the sea are long and sandy.

The Balkan Mountains run across the middle of Bulgaria, and north of them the fertile Danubian Plain slopes down to the Danube. In the south rise the Rila, Pirin and Rhodope mountains. Musala, in the Rila Mountains, is 2,925 meters high, the highest peak in the whole Balkan Peninsula. The Rila and Pirin ranges hold several hundred lakes left by ancient glaciers.

Bulgaria has about 500 mineral springs, and half of them are warm or hot. Most of the country has a moderate continental climate, and the lowlands have snow on the ground for about 25 to 30 days a year. The Black Sea coast has long sandy beaches and the harbors of Varna and Burgas.

The Danubian Plain, averaging 178 m and covering about 31,600 km², rises south to the Balkan Mountains, whose rounded summits average 722 m and reach 2,376 m at Botev. South of a transitional zone of block-faulted ranges lies the Rila-Rhodope Massif: Musala (2,925 m), in the Rila, is the highest point of the Balkan Peninsula, Vikhren in the Pirin reaches 2,914 m, and the Rila and Pirin hold several hundred lakes of glacial origin. UNESCO's Pirin National Park (1983, extended to about 40,000 ha) spans limestone landscapes with glacial lakes, waterfalls, caves and mostly coniferous forest.

Apart from the Danube, rivers are short (the Maritsa, Iskŭr, Struma, Arda, Tundzha and Yantra); more than half the runoff drains to the Black Sea and the rest to the Aegean. There are some 500 mineral springs, half of them warm or hot, reaching 103 °C at Sapareva Banya. The climate is moderate continental, tempered by Mediterranean influence in the south; the mean annual temperature is 10.5 °C, with recorded extremes of −38 °C and 45 °C, and precipitation from 450 mm in the northeast to more than 1,190 mm in the highest mountains.

Chamois live high in the Rila Mountains.

Owls, bats and martens live there too. Pelicans, herons and egrets live at a lake by the Danube. Almost 100 kinds of birds raise their young there.

Bulgaria has many kinds of plants and animals because it sits where several great natural regions of Europe and Asia meet. In Rila National Park live chamois, wild animals of the high mountains, along with martens, owls, bats and birds such as the capercaillie and the wallcreeper. About one in three of Bulgaria's nesting bird species can be found in the park.

Beside the Danube, the Srebarna Nature Reserve is a freshwater lake where almost 100 kinds of birds breed. UNESCO names the Dalmatian pelican, great egret, purple heron and white spoonbill among its most interesting birds, and about 80 more species spend the winter there.

Britannica attributes Bulgaria's relatively large number of species to its position next to several Eurasian biogeographic zones. During the Pleistocene, life here was not destroyed by advancing glaciers, as in much of Europe, but enriched by species arriving from the north, some of which survive; steppe influences also reached it. Most plants and animals are central European, with Arctic-alpine types in the high mountains, steppe species in the northeast and southeast and Mediterranean species in the south.

Rila National Park shelters suslik, rock partridge, chamois, capercaillie, chough, accentor, wallcreeper, owls, bats and martens, with about a third of Bulgaria's nesting birds and a third of its invertebrates, and fish such as the Balkan trout. Srebarna Nature Reserve (UNESCO, 1983), a freshwater lake of more than 600 ha beside the Danube, is the breeding ground of almost 100 bird species; UNESCO's most interesting species there include the Dalmatian pelican, great egret, night heron, purple heron, glossy ibis and white spoonbill; Britannica notes it was placed on the danger list in 1992 after environmental decline and improved in the early 21st century.

About 6.4 million people live in Bulgaria.

Most people speak Bulgarian. It is written with Cyrillic letters. In May and June, people pick roses to make a sweet-smelling oil.

About 6.4 million people lived in Bulgaria at the end of 2025, and almost three in four live in towns and cities. Bulgarian is a Slavic language written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Turks are the largest minority group, and there are Roma communities and smaller groups of Armenians, Russians, Greeks and others.

In May and June, the rose valleys around Karlovo and Kazanlak celebrate the roses in bloom. People pick oil-bearing roses, and their fresh petals are distilled into attar of roses, a perfume oil sold around the world. Summer brings folk and music festivals, such as the International Folklore Festival in Burgas.

NSI counted 6,423,207 residents at the end of 2025. Britannica gives Bulgarians as more than four-fifths of the population and Turks, the largest minority, as about one-tenth, living in parts of the northeast and the eastern Rhodopes; Roma are another sizable minority. Bulgarian is a South Slavic language, closely related to Macedonian and written in Cyrillic. There is no official religion; most religious Bulgarians belong to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, with Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Armenian minorities. The urban share passed the rural in 1969 and is now almost three-fourths, and from 1949 to 1999 Sofia's population doubled while Plovdiv's grew more than ninefold.

Britannica describes contemporary culture as a blend of millennium-old folk traditions and a formal culture that helped build national consciousness under Ottoman rule. The mummer (kuker) tradition survives in the southwest. Rose harvests in the Karlovo and Kazanlŭk valleys in May and June supply attar of roses for export, and festivals include the International Folklore Festival in Burgas, the Varna Summer International Festival and Sofia Musical Weeks.