Varna

Varna has a long pedestrian centre, a nineteenth-century opera house, a cathedral, Roman bath ruins in the middle of town and a substantial park running the length of the seafront — the sea garden, which is the city's living room and holds an aquarium, a planetarium and an open-air theatre along its length. It is a naval and shipping city first, which is why it does not close in winter, and that independence from the season is the single practical reason to base here rather than in a resort.

The archaeological museum holds the finds from a prehistoric necropolis excavated on the city's edge, including the oldest worked gold ever recovered anywhere. That claim is not regional promotion and the objects are not decorative curiosities — the burials reset what was known about early social hierarchy in Europe. The full argument belongs to the coast guide; the local point is simply that this is a modest provincial museum containing a genuine world first, it is in the middle of the city, and most people on this coast never go in.

North of the city the coast becomes a run of large purpose-built resorts on wide sand — high capacity, everything laid on, and among the cheapest full-service beach weeks in Europe. Beyond them the shoreline changes: a wooded cape with a monastery in the trees, a botanic garden on the cliffs, and a stretch where the land drops to the sea in slumped terraces rather than beaches. Anyone finding the resort strip too much will find the coast recognisable again within a short drive north.

Just west of the city, out on the plain, stands a field of natural stone columns several metres high — a geological formation of hollow calcareous pillars with no agreed explanation, standing in sand like the remains of a colonnade. It takes half an hour to see and almost nobody schedules it. Further inland the province runs into farmland and the road toward the Danube, and the interior here is quiet, agricultural and largely unvisited.