Vessela Sergueva

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.

Bulgaria, once home to the Ancient Thracian civilisation, laid a gilded lure for tourists recently with a dazzling display of its nine most important gold and silver artefacts, seen together for the first time. The objects, dating back between the fifth millennium BC and the third century AD "form part of the foundations of European civilisation", President Georgi Parvanov said.