Burgas is the big city of Bulgaria's southern Black Sea coast: a lively, modern port with a bustling pedestrian centre, a long Sea Garden along the shore and a pier that juts out into the water. Above all, though, it's the best base for discovering one of the richest corners of Bulgaria for nature. Surrounded by lagoons and salt lakes, it's a birdwatching paradise, with flamingos, pelicans and storks stopping over on their great migration route.
The city itself is made for strolling: Aleksandrovska Street and the pedestrian streets around it, the Sea Garden with its statues and viewpoints, the city beaches and the pier, perfect at sunset. All around it you'll find the Poda reserve, Lake Atanasovsko with its pink salt pans and flamingos, the salt pans and healing mud of Pomorie, and the thermal site of Aquae Calidae, where hot springs have been flowing for more than two thousand years.
This guide takes a practical look at Burgas: what to see in the city and the natural areas around it, when to go for flamingos and birds, how to get there by plane, train or bus, how to get around, and how to use Burgas as a base for Nesebar, Sozopol and the southern coast. A gateway city to the Black Sea, where urban life sits side by side with lagoons full of birds just minutes from the centre.
Burgas is a relatively young city compared with its neighbours, but the area around it has an ancient history. There were Thracian settlements and Greek colonies here, and very close by, at Aquae Calidae, hot springs attracted Thracians, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans for millennia, even Suleiman the Magnificent. The present-day city grew up around a small port in Ottoman times (with the name Burgas, linked to the word for 'tower' or 'fortress'), and above all after Bulgaria's liberation in 1878, when it developed into the major commercial and industrial port of the south, with the arrival of the railway and, later, the petrochemical industry. Today it's the second city on the coast and the natural capital of the southern coast. We tell the whole story on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Black Sea shore was colonised by the Greeks 2,600 years ago and holds everything from the Thracian gold of Varna to the Byzantine churches of Nesebar, among old fishing towns and modern resorts.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Although the city of Burgas is relatively young, the bay and its surroundings have a very ancient history, tied to a gift of nature: thermal waters. A few kilometres from today's centre, at the place now called Aquae Calidae ('hot waters' in Latin), hot mineral springs rise to the surface and have drawn the peoples of the region since time immemorial. The Thracians, who lived in this part of the Balkans before anyone else, considered these springs sacred and worshipped them; some link them to a sanctuary dedicated to the nymphs.
With the arrival of the Greeks on the Black Sea coast, and above all with the Roman expansion across the Balkans in the first centuries AD, those waters became a full-fledged spa. In the 1st century, the Romans built monumental baths here, and the site — also known as Thermopolis or Aquae Calidae — became famous throughout the empire for the healing properties of its waters. Emperors and illustrious figures visited the spa, which remained in use during the Byzantine period.
Meanwhile, the Bay of Burgas, with its lagoons and salt lakes, was a rich setting for fishing, salt and birds, and around it there were small Thracian, Greek (such as nearby Anchialos, today's Pomorie) and Roman settlements and fortifications. But the city we know today would still take centuries to take shape.
During the Middle Ages, this whole coast was the stage for the struggle between the Byzantine Empire and the Bulgarian states, with its fortresses changing hands. In the area of present-day Burgas there were fortifications — one of them, it is believed, on the spot where the city would later grow — and the waters of Aquae Calidae kept attracting visitors in medieval times too, now under the Slavic name of the region.
With the Ottoman conquest of Bulgaria at the end of the 14th century, the area passed to the Ottoman Empire, where it would remain for almost five centuries. It was during this period that a small fishing and trading port began to form on the bay, giving rise to the city. The name Burgas itself is usually linked to the word 'pyrgos' (tower, in Greek) or to the Latin 'burgus' (fortress), in reference to some tower or watchtower guarding the coast. For a long time it was a modest place, in the shadow of more important ports.
The thermal waters, however, kept their fame even under the Ottomans: in the 16th century, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent himself had a bath (hammam) built at Aquae Calidae, whose restored remains — with their marble interiors and oriental decoration — can still be visited today. So the same springs once revered by the Thracians now served the Ottoman baths: one of the longest continuously used spas in Europe.
The real birth of modern Burgas came with Bulgaria's liberation from Ottoman rule in 1877-1878. Incorporated into the new Bulgarian state (first in autonomous Eastern Rumelia and then in the Principality and Kingdom of Bulgaria), the city benefited from a privileged position: its large natural bay, the most important on the southern Bulgarian coast, made it the ideal candidate for developing a first-rate commercial port.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Burgas grew rapidly. A modern port was built, linking it by sea with the rest of Europe and the world, and the railway arrived, connecting it with the interior of the country — with Plovdiv and Sofia — and turning it into southern Bulgaria's great outlet to the Black Sea. The city was planned with a regular layout, wide avenues and European-style buildings, and its population, drawn by work at the port and in trade, multiplied. It was also in those decades that the Sea Garden was created, the large seaside park that is still the city's pride.
In just a few decades, Burgas went from a modest fishing port to a modern, cosmopolitan and growing city, the second on the Bulgarian coast. All around it, the lagoons and salt lakes — Atanasovsko, Mandrensko, Burgassko — remained a natural treasure, with their salt pans and their extraordinary wealth of birdlife.
The 20th century established Burgas as the economic powerhouse of southern Bulgaria. During the socialist period (1944-1989), the city industrialised on a large scale: its port was expanded to become Bulgaria's largest on the Black Sea, and in the 1960s one of the largest petrochemical complexes in the Balkans, the Neftochim refinery, was built on the outskirts, making Burgas a key industrial centre and attracting thousands of workers. The population grew strongly and the city spread out with new neighbourhoods.
At the same time, the southern Black Sea coast was developed for tourism. Although the big resorts — Sunny Beach, to the north, next to Nesebar — lay outside the municipality, Burgas became the gateway and transport hub for the whole southern coast, with its airport welcoming crowds of tourists every summer on their way to the beaches. The city thus combined its industrial and port side with its role as the coast's main service centre.
That dual character — heavy industry and tourism — also brought environmental challenges, especially because of the pressure on the lagoons and wetlands surrounding the city. In recent decades, awareness of the value of these ecosystems has grown, and several of the lagoons — Poda, Atanasovsko — have been protected as nature reserves of international importance for birds.
After the fall of communism in 1989 and the transition of the 1990s, Burgas has reinvented itself. Without giving up its port or its industry, the city has made a strong commitment to quality of life, culture and sustainable tourism. Its centre has been renovated, with large pedestrian areas; the Sea Garden and its iconic pier over the sea have been revitalised; and the natural treasures of the surroundings have been showcased, turning Burgas into an ecotourism and birdwatching destination recognised across Europe. Bulgaria's entry into the European Union in 2007 gave that transformation a boost.
Today Burgas offers an unusual combination: a modern, pleasant city with a cultural life — summer festivals such as Spirit of Burgas, theatres and museums — alongside exceptional nature right on its doorstep. In a few minutes you go from the bustle of the pedestrian centre to the pink salt pans of Lake Atanasovsko, the flamingos and pelicans of the Poda reserve, or the age-old hot waters of Aquae Calidae, with Suleiman's hammam. And a short distance away await the jewels of the coast: UNESCO World Heritage Nesebar, charming Sozopol, the beaches of the south.
From that modest tower by the Ottoman-era bay to the second city of the Bulgarian coast, Burgas has managed to become the great gateway to the southern Black Sea: a city where the port, industry, culture and nature live side by side, and from which a whole coastline with thousands of years of history opens up.
