Country Profile: Bulgaria

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Historically, the Bulgarian tourism industry has focused on mass tourism, which caters to high volume/low value programs that do not significantly enhance the Bulgarian economy, and do little to preserve the significant local cultural and environmental resources that make Bulgaria a unique and highly desirable tourist destination. In order to generate higher per-tourist revenues and to keep more of the money in-country, Bulgaria has begun to look toward capturing higher end markets for niche tourism. Bulgaria’s Biodiversity Conservation and Economic Growth (BCEG) project has developed an ecotourism niche market to help achieve multiple objectives, including nature conservation and biodiversity protection, rural development, government decentralization, and new employment opportunities. Other goals of the BCEG project were to promote gender equity, reduce poverty, and enhance local governance.

The project worked in Bulgaria’s Rila National Park and Central Balkan National Park, using the competitive cluster approach to develop an operational model for ecotourism destination development that included such activities as eco-enterprise development, developing and implementing park management plans, and improving public awareness to ensure support for biodiversity conservation. A second phase expanded activities to the national level, developing a sustainable tourism policy and action plan which will be delivered through public/private partnerships, and which is anticipated to contribute significantly to Bulgaria’s growing GDP in the period 2004-2010. This National Plan is complemented by 12 Regional Action Plans.

Bulgaria: National and Regional Ecotourism Strategy Project factsheet (1.48MB PDF) UN-WTO Sustainable Tourism Forum presentation (4.684MB PPT, 4KB HTML) Country Profile: Bulgaria (226KB PDF)