Sunny Beach is the biggest resort in Bulgaria. It is located on the Black Sea Coast and extends 5.5 km along the coast between Nessebar and St. Vlas (Sveti Vlas). It is the resort with the largest number of beds in the country – more than 300 000. With its numerous restaurants, nightclubs and discos, Sunny Beach attracts mainly young tourists looking for noisy beach parties until dawn and endless opportunities for entertainment. Playgrounds, tennis courts, football fields and water parks provide everything necessary for those seeking active recreation opportunities. On the coast you can practice a wide range of water sports.
One of the biggest advantages is the excellent beach. It stretches along the entire length of the resort and ranks among the best in Bulgaria.
The biggest attraction of the resort of Sunny Beach is located on the coast. It comes to the unique sand dunes in the area called “Babata”.
Covered here and there with dry grasses and shrubs, the dunes add an exotic, wild and romantic feeling to the otherwise perfectly manicured beach.
Sunny Beach has a temperate climate with hot summers and cold winters. Beach season begins in late May and lasts until the end of September, including the first week of October in warmer years.
At the beginning of the tourist season, the sea water temperature is usually still cool, but it reaches more than 20°C in June and about 24 – 26°C in August. Winters are cold and dark, with a few days with thin snow cover throughout the year.
Today the main disadvantage of Sunny Beach is the combination of overcrowding of tourists and serious overdevelopment of the complex.
When the construction of the resort began in 1979, the main purpose of the architects was to create a good-looking resort for wealthy tourists from Western Europe.
In the area was built a limited number of hotels, and the space between them was arranged with exotic vegetation.
After 1989, however, things have changed dramatically. Hotels have sprung up like mushrooms in close proximity to each other, and almost nothing remained from the former lovely vegetation.
Today, the resort is known as a vacation spot for people with relatively limited financial resources, and among the population of Scandinavia and other countries in Northern Europe Sunny Beach is famous as one of the most popular alcohol tourism destinations.
Despite its shortcomings, Sunny Beach continues to attract huge crowds of visitors. Although there are different ways to get there, the resort is most easily accessible through the Bourgas International Airport, which is just about 27 km from Sunny Beach.
Although more remote, the International Airport of Varna is also relatively convenient, as it is located just over an hour’s drive from the resort.