A victim of its own success with tourism, Bulgaria is struggling to contain excessive construction that is destroying its Black Sea coast and beginning to turn visitors away.
Along the beaches north of Varna, the country’s main Black Sea resort, hotels are springing up like mushrooms, directly on the sand.
Without regulation to control architectural styles, kitsch has taken over: a castle-like hotel stands next to the antique statues and columns of its next-door neighbour, while a nearby bar makes do with a simple shed.
“People now investing [in hotels] will not have enough tourists in three years’ time … and will earn less and less because of the bad image beach resorts are acquiring,” the head of the state tourism agency, Mario al-Djaburi, warned.
“Certain hotels are built without any illusions of making a profit, only as a way of laundering money,” a hotel owner at the Golden Sands resort town, north of Varna, said.
“Among the owners are former heads of criminal groups who have turned to legal dealings, but also politicians,” he noted pointedly.
“We are alarmed by the mass construction work that is destroying nature along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast,” added Lyudmila Nenkova, manager of the Riviera resort, one of the few that has avoided the worst excesses of the construction boom.
Parliament is currently discussing a Bill to protect the coastline, which is “too urbanised … like in other European countries 25 years ago”.
The proposed legislation would ban construction on the beaches as well as in resort towns and small coastal villages, which lack sufficient infrastructure in terms of central sewage, waste management, running water and even electricity.
Bulgarian officials admit that while they can shape future construction on their coast, they have little hope of changing what is already there.
“There is no way to tear down the hotels that have already been constructed on the beaches, as this is not illegal under existing legislation,” said Regional Development Minister Asen Gagauzov.
But it was “better late than never”, according to President Georgi Parvanov as he commented on the proposed changes to legislation.
Bulgaria, which is working to draw tourists to the Black Sea in summer and to ski resorts in winter, attracted four million visitors in 2005, 2% up from the previous year. The industry, according to official figures, generated some â,¬1,9-billion in profit, up 8,13% from 2004.
At the Golden Sands, German, British and Scandinavian tourists arrived in mid-May to enjoy the half-empty beaches ahead of the high summer season.
But tour operators have reported a drop in their number since construction work surged early last season, and some beachgoers said it was a distraction.
“We have been spending our holidays in Bulgaria for the past seven years as it is not expensive and the conditions are good. But we also noticed the progressive destruction of the surrounding forest and now find ourselves in the middle of a concrete jungle,” said one retired German couple.
Operator ITS saw reservations fall by 10% this year and “the peak of over-the-top construction” caused it to make last-minute offers at a reduced price in May, ITS representative Kalin Sutev told the Dnevnik daily.
“Three-star hotels are offering beds at â,¬5 a night” to avoid remaining empty, Bogdan Hristov, a representative of British First Choice, another operator, also told Dnevnik.
But he also questioned how Bulgarian beaches could hope to turn a profit out of anything other than mass tourism.
The Riviera’s Nenkova stressed that the Black Sea area was still “a competitive destination because of the good value it offers compared to Spain, Greece or Turkey”.
And expenses not included in holiday packages, such as water-skiing or beer, are quite cheap for tourists, she said.
A new trend is the sale of apartments and country homes close to the sea to British buyers, who hope to let them and see them as a good investment.
“The profit margin is enormous because the price of construction is between â,¬200 and â,¬400 per square metre, but a square metre can sell for up to â,¬1Â 000,” one hotel owner said. — AFP