Sofia Airport → Albena

Albena was purpose-built in the 1960s as a self-contained holiday resort, and it still shows in the layout: hotels are set well back from the shore behind gardens and pine groves, with a wide, flat, Blue Flag-certified beach left largely uninterrupted in front. That planning makes it one of the most accessible resorts on the coast, popular with families with young children and with visitors who use wheelchairs or have limited mobility.

A wooden boardwalk runs along part of the beach, and the resort offers one of the widest ranges of water sports on the coast, from banana boats to windsurfing. A short drive away, the cliffside town of Balchik and its royal Botanical Garden make an easy and worthwhile half-day trip, as does the strange, forest of stone pillars known as Pobiti Kamani, or the 'Stone Forest'.