Bansko is a winter ski resort town that’s rebranding to a summer resort.

Twenty years ago, Bansko was tiny. It had a small old town with historical buildings where people actually lived, a large museum for a person the communists really liked, and some restaurants where you could actually eat without spending a fortune. It was a place you’d visit on your way to the mountain and back, eat tarator, and drink beer.

Over the years, it gained a larger ski zone with a gondola, a million hotels, and became very busy in the winter. However, summers remained mostly empty with most hotels and restaurants closed until next winter. We would roam around between the 4-5 functioning nice restaurants. Even the nicest were still mostly okay price-wise, just a few started turning into tourist traps.

Something started changing over the last 2-3 years. The municipality started rebuilding the central streets and sidewalks. That process is pretty far ahead already, as you can see from the photos. The walking areas now stretch for many kilometers, historical buildings have been restored, the river has been cleaned, street gyms have been installed, and so on. It worked, and Bansko is now so full of people in the summer that it’s the busiest I’ve ever seen it. Restaurants that didn’t even exist last year are open, working and full of customers, with only a few still closed for the season.

Cats are everywhere

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I like this new Bansko as much as I liked the old one.

• More foreign tourists have driven the prices up, and they are reaching levels that are not okay for locals. Prices are at least 30% up since last year.
• The hotel we used to visit every year (Lucky Bansko) started charging us €60 extra per night for our big kid. I paid this a few times but it got under my skin and I decided that enough is enough.
• Food quality at the central restaurants is noticeably lower. I suspect they had to hire some unskilled kitchen workers, which led to both compromises in taste and in hygiene. I can no longer recommend eating there, after decades of being a safe town where the food was generally fine everywhere.

We won’t quit going to Bansko, it’s one of the places we are connected to. But we have to alter how we use it. From 5* hotels to rented apartments, and from trying restaurants to just sticking to the few places where we know the people who run them. After all, it’s the mountain that makes that place nice, not the freshly built 100-year-old tourists traps.

We certainly like the new pedestrian areas and the cat explosion that all these people have caused.