Prehistoric goddesses dancing in dark caves. Thick forests climbing up forbidding mountains, moist from the breath of hidden waterfalls. Intriguing museums where ancient gold treasures share space with... a nuclear power plant model. Red rocks frozen in phantasmagorical shapes, with macabre stories to add. Winding rivers passing by abandoned Communist-era monuments and factories, and picturesque monasteries. Towns that have seen better times, but still strive to reinvent themselves. Roman ruins amid drab modern houses. Restaurants for gourmet food and for a unapologetically local interpretation of turbot, a fish that lives far, far away. Award-winning wineries and some really good beer, including craft varieties.

Are you ready to immerse yourself in a region of contradictions? Welcome to the Bulgarian Northwest!

It is easy to fall for the cliches when talking about Bulgaria's Northwest. After all, this is still one of the EU's poorest regions – a territory devastated by mass emigration and abandonment of industrial facilities and agricultural land that followed the collapse of Communism with its planned economy. When you travel around, you will be constantly surrounded by modern ruins and villages that have seen better times, and more inhabitants.

Still, Bulgaria's Northwest is one of the most fascinating regions to explore, and in the past couple of years it has made real progress in both making itself more hospitable and more exciting – hence the gourmet food, the wineries and the craft beer. Here are just some of its other highlights.

Belogradchik and its rocks

A schoolgirl, a dervish, a horseman, a mother and child, a lion and even a Nephertiti (the Egyptian Queen): in Belogradchik, your sense for pareidolia – the ability to "see" patterns and shapes in random objects, like clouds, drops into overdrive. Formed millions of years ago, the Belogradchik Rocks tickle the imagination. Locals have come with scores of legends explaining how this or that group of cliffs appeared. Most of them, predictably, macabre.

The fort nestled in one of the most impressive formations dates back to Roman times, yet the outlines that you see today are Ottoman, from the early 19th century.

Belogradchik itself is a quiet town enjoying increased post-pandemic interest from mostly Bulgarian tourists and offering attractions such as hot air balloon rides and summertime open air opera performances.

Magura Cave

About 8,000 years ago the early farmers living in the verdant lands near Rabisha Lake by Belogradchik painted some walls in a nearby cave with odd figures: stick-like dancing women, hunting men, strange birds and black suns. Their drawings, made with bat guano, still baffle. No one knows what the images at Magura Cave mean or represent – an irrelevant question anyway when talking about prehistoric "art." Some interpret them as representation of fertility rituals, others as an early calendar, the "earliest" in Europe.

Unfortunately, after a recent incident of vandalism, this section of Magura Cave – the only site in Bulgaria with preserved rock art, was closed to visitors. Tourists can still walk the rest of the cave – a labyrinth of subterranean halls full of stalactites and stalagmites.

Vratsa Balkan Nature Park

With its peaks, deep river valleys and gorges, the northernmost part of the Stara Planina defines to a significant extent the geography of the Northwest. Parts of it, which hover over Vratsa and cover about 80 acres, is a designated nature park, the Vratsa Balkan.

The easiest way to see some of the beauties of Vratsa Balkan Nature Park is to... take the train from Sofia to Varna, and gasp at the rising rocks at Lakatnik. People ready to explore on foot and by car will get more: the rock formations of the Ledenika Cave, the forbidding Vratsata Gorge, the 63-metre-high Borov Kamak waterfall and

the 141-metre-high Vratchanska Skaklya, the highest in the Balkans. 

Vola Peak is a site important not for its natural settings, but for its history. Here, in 1876, revolutionary Hristo Botev was killed in battle with the Ottomans. A tall cross, which under Communism was adorned with a five-pointed star, marks the peak.

Vratsa

One of the main towns in the Northwest, Vratsa is more than a convenient base for exploration of the nearby mountains. Its history museum preserves some of the most fascinating ancient Thracians treasurers ever found: the silver cups and bowls of the Rogozen Treasure, the strange greave with the tattooed face of the Thracian Great Goddess on the kneecap. Yet, the strangest room here is dedicated to something modern: the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant. The space is full of toxic light and scaled models of nuclear reactors.

Vratsa's pleasantly walkable central alleys (a feature envied by Sofianites fed up with walking on uneven sidewalks) will bring you to a couple of beautiful Revival Period buildings housing the local Ethnography Museum. Possibly, the most surprising places of interest in Vratsa are... two towers. Sturdy, built of heavy stones, they were erected in the 16th-18th centuries to protect locals during bandit raids. Standing now amid the modern town, they remind both of the dangers of the past and of the resilience of the people of Vratsa.

Iskar Gorge

The Iskar river crosses the Stara Planina mountain in a spectacular way, forming Bulgaria's longest gorge. For 84 kms, it sneaks through stunning cliffs, pristine meadows and tiny villages hanging on steep slopes.

Taking the train is recommended – you can enjoy the scenery without being preoccupied with the antics of Bulgarian drivers on the winding road through Svoge. Hop off from the train to wander around the Lakatnik rocks, crowned with a Communist monument to participants in the failed September 1923 Uprising, and the Cherepish rocks that host the eponymous monastery and an abandoned clerical school.

By car, however, you have even more options to explore, like the 85-metre Bovska Skaklya waterfall near Zasele village, the Seven Thrones monastery and the vistas – and one of the few options to grab a bite – from the monument of fictional character Dyado Yotso.

Memory of Major Thompson

A village in the Iskar Gorge, Tompsan (sic), is named after a young British officer sent to Nazi-ally Bulgaria during the Second World War to establish contacts with the local Communist resistance. Captain Frank Thompson arrived in the Bulgarian lands in January 1944. On 23 May he was captured after a battle between partizani and Bulgarian police near the village of Batuliya, in the Iskar Gorge. On 10 June 1944 he was executed alongside two others near the village of Litakovo.

After 1944 Frank Thompson was placed in the Bulgarian Communist canon. In 1960, several small villages around Batuliya were incorporated in a bigger settlement, Tompsan. In the 1970s his remains were reburied in the fraternal mound near Litakovo. The inscription on his tombstone reads: "Captain Thompson, an Englishman." He was promoted to major posthumously. 

In 1973, a monument was erected in Batuliya to commemorate the battle, one of the heaviest defeats that the Communist partizani suffered. In 2007 a new monument to Major Thompson, sponsored by the British Embassy, was unveiled in front of the village council of Tompsan.

Vidin

Standing at the Danube river, Vidin is the descendant of an ancient Roman fort that grew into a major medieval Bulgarian stronghold – one that would give birth to the last dynasty of Bulgarian kings, the Shishmans. Most of the old remains that you see today in Vidin, however, are from Ottoman times, when the city was a major Danube port. The best known of these are the Baba Vida citadel, the remains of Vidin outer fortification walls and the main gate, Stamboul Kapi, and the mosque and military barracks build by Osman Pazavantoglou, a maverick warlord who controlled the region in the cusp of the 19th century.

Around these are the last remaining neo-Classical and neo-Baroque houses and public buildings created after Bulgaria's liberation, the last survivors from the vast modernisation efforts under Communism and the 2000s-2020s blind demolition to make space for newer construction. The most impressive of those is the neo-Gothic synagogue. Built in the early 20th century, it was abandoned after local Jews emigrated to Israel, in the late 1940s-early 1950s. Until recently, the synagogue was on the verge of collapse. It was eventually restored and is now a cultural centre.

One of Vidin's greatest delights is the stroll along the Danube on the lively promenade and the nice riverside park. If you visit in summer, stock up on mosquito repellent. You are going to need it.

Kula

If it weren't for the stubbornness of a poor Ottoman, this drab town west of Vidin would be of interests to only diehard fans of World World Two history and Communist-era monuments arriving to see the rather unimpressive monument to dead Red Army soldiers and the real Soviet rocket launcher, known as Katyusha, permanently parked in a field near town.

Most of the few tourists, however, visit Kula for the remains of Kastra Martis, a Roman fort that miraculously survives in the middle of town. Kula is actually named after it – the word means "tower." In the 19th century an Ottoman governor was ready to knock Kastra Martis down to modernise the town, but the owner of the land refused – the ancient ruins were also supporting his house. The old Ottoman house is no more, but the brick-and-stone walls of the fort are here, a monument to one man's refusal to yield to progress and modernity.

The mouth of the Timok River

The last 15 km for the course of the rather small Timok River are important for modern Bulgaria's geography. Since 1878, they have formed the northernmost part of its northern border. The estuary of the river is where Bulgaria ends and Serbia begins.

The spot is quiet and pristine, a riverine scape of muddy flats and cornfields, of cottonwood and willows, of mostly slow waters. Unsurprisingly, the spot is a favourite place for local anglers from both sides of the border.

A handful of ancient forts, now long forgotten and hardly visible, dot the environs. The only other thing around that might grab your attention is the bizarre makeshift "monument" to... Bulgarian, Soviet and Cuban "friendship" in nearby Vrav village.

Berkovitsa

The first town that you will go through after crossing into the Northwest through the Petrohan Pass, Berkovitsa is famed for its brass music bands performing the specific Balkan mixture of folklore, Ottoman and what sometimes evokes klezmer tunes. The best time to experience it is during the music festival in September, or, if you are lucky, to stumble upon a local wedding. 

Outside of these, your visit to Berkovitsa will probably be a quiet one, but do not miss the old clock tower. It was built in the 1760s with donations from the local artisans and the Ottoman administration that recognised the need for a more structured workday – the chimes of the clock would tell both artisans and customers when shops opened. The clock's mechanism was made in Bucharest and still works, measuring time with its copper bells.

Berkovitsa is the starting point for a hike to the 2016-metre-high Kom Peak. This is the trailhead to the challenging route that goes all the way along the ridge of the Stara Planina until it meets the Black Sea, about 600 km later, at Cape Emine.

Chiprovtsi

Today Chiprovtsi is sleepy and depopulated, a town still remembering its Communist-era mining industry. It is hard to imagine that in the 16th-17th centuries it was one of the liveliest Bulgarian communities. It thrived on mining local copper ores and making exquisite gold jewellery, and consisted mainly of... Roman Catholics.

In times when most Bulgarians living in the Ottoman Empire were cut off from the broader world, the people of Chiprovtsi travelled and traded far and wide. Some of their brightest even studied in Rome and formed a small, but active intellectual elite that published the first printed Bulgarian books.

It all brutally ended in 1688. The Bulgarians in Chiprovtsi believed that if they rose in arms against the Ottomans, the Austrians, who were engaged in yet another war with the sultan, would come to the rescue. The promised help never came. The Ottoman reprisal was brutal. The prosperous Chiprovtsi was no more. The community revived about a century later, but this time it was another trade that helped people make both ends meet, carpentry.

Gradually, local artisans created elaborate patterns full of symbolic meaning. Today, Chiprovtsi carpets are UNESCO intangible heritage. You will see them in the local museum.

God's Bridge

In a region that appears stuck in its bad fortunes – depopulation, unemployment and lack of business opportunities, the presence of a place called God's Bridge appears illogical. The northwesterners often call themselves "god-forgotten." 

And yet, here it is – a 20-metre-long stone arch, a stunning sight when you watch it from the cavern below. God's Bridge was formed in the soft karst rocks near the villages of Lilyache and Zhabokrek by a small river, Lilyashka Bara. Of course, it has a legend attached to it: somewhere inside in the cave adjacent to the stone arch the gold loom of Roman Empress Helena lies hidden.