Sunny Beach

I’m sitting on a queen sized bed in a room on the top floor of a hotel in what is easily one of the most Western, upscale places in Bulgaria, and all I can think about is that the cable TV in the room doesn’t work.

Sunny Beach has a strange effect on people.

Looking out of my balcony, I see a stretch of miles of pure white sand and luxury hotels. This is a scene more likely found in Florida or California – a small strip of America cut away, airlifted, and tossed down haphazardly at the edge of Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. The streets are clean, the buildings are all new (and actually completed). Sunny Beach offers, at first glance, a vision of Bulgaria’s potential as a tourist destination.


Scratch a bit beneath the surface, and you can come to find small bits of the Bulgaria I’ve come to love. Directly below the balcony, hidden away from the main road and in the middle of two swimming pools was a garden in which an old baba was picking tomatoes, just as she probably has in that same spot her whole life. Yet soon, this place too will be uprooted and the land subdivided and cleared for another hotel – its ground floor serving English breakfasts to German tourists.

During my visit to Sunny Beach, I felt (for the first time) like a visitor to the country in which I now live. I felt it was a place in which Bulgaria was being pushed out, hidden away, and erased, the only useful thing salvaged being the obligatory Shopska Salad on every menu. Sunny Beach felt to me like a bus stop to which tourists flock for cheap booze and (relatively) more lenient laws. It felt like the Cancun of Europe. The Daytona of the Balkans. I’m reminded of a Monty Python sketch from the Meaning of Life in which a waiter asks a couple of American tourists, “Have you ever wondered just why you’re here?” Their response is that of the stereotypical tourist: “Well we went to Miami last year, and Philadelphia the year before that, and this seemed like a nice enough place to go.” A trip to Sunny Beach is just that – another place to go without having to confront the bigger issues present around it.

It occurred to me as I watched the hordes of people milling around the center that Sunny Beach is really just one spot of debauchery on the beach that exploits the country’s status as a developing nation – a place that provides the perfect combination of lax laws and lower prices. Just like its Mexican counterpart (Cancun) Sunny Beach doesn’t try to entice visitors inland (or if they do, on packaged tours) or encourage them to contribute in any way to the local population.

For example, just a couple of kilometers away from Sunny Beach are some typical Bulgarian villages, just scraping to get by, its youth inevitably leaving for the promise that a job in Sunny Beach provides. By bypassing the country’s challenges on their beeline trek to the beach, the people who come here also miss out on the real Bulgaria. Sure, they don’t have to see the poverty, or confront the corruption. The biggest problem they face is which novelty t-shirt to buy at the souvenir store. But the downside is that they don’t get to see anything uniquely Bulgarian. Worse, they don’t even support the country to which they have come, their money going instead to English and German developers who skip town during the low season, leaving the locals scrounging for cash during the brutal winter.

Driving down here from Preslav, we must have passed through 20 little villages. We passed through winding mountain roads that opened up into fields of sunflowers. We stopped at a lake lined with beautiful rock formations. Our driver pointed out to us the house in which her grandmother was born. The two hour drive to Sunny Beach held more character and liveliness than the entire two day stay in Sunny Beach itself. The change in scenery alone was enough to make a person forget all about life in the rest of Bulgaria.

I hope I never do.