21 Best Things to Do in Varna, Bulgaria, and What They Cost

The best thing to do in Varna is see the Varna Necropolis gold at the Archaeological Museum, because it is the oldest worked gold anywhere in the world, made between roughly 4600 and 4200 BC by people who were doing it 1,500 years before the Egyptians. Everything else in Varna sits within about half an hour of that museum: a 7,000 m² Roman bath complex, a cave monastery in the cliffs, a beach resort strip, and a seafront park with a zoo, an aquarium and a dolphinarium inside it.

Two to three days covers the city comfortably. Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026 and the lev stopped being legal tender on 1 February, so every price below is in euro and there is no longer any currency to change.

The 21 best things to do in Varna

The 21 attractions worth your time in Varna are listed below, starting with the ones that justify the trip and ending with the beaches and the water park. Admission prices are the ones in force around the euro changeover and museums here change them rarely, but check the venue’s own site before you go.

1. Varna Archaeological Museum

The Varna Archaeological Museum holds the oldest gold treasure in the world, and it is the reason to come to this city. The museum sits at 41 Maria Luisa Boulevard in a Neo-Renaissance building put up as the Varna Girls’ School and designed by Petko Momchilov, and it opened as a museum in 1888. The Varna Necropolis gold, excavated in 1972 and dated to about 4600-4200 BC, fills three halls; grave 43 alone held more gold than every other known site of the period put together. The rest of the collection runs from Thracian and Greek Odessos through Rome, Byzantium and the Ottoman centuries. Adults pay about €5, students about €1.50.

2. Roman Thermae

The Roman Thermae are the fourth largest surviving Roman baths in Europe and the largest in the Balkans. They stand in the middle of Varna at the corner of San Stefano and Khan Krum streets, built in the late 2nd century AD when Odessos belonged to the Roman province of Moesia, and covering about 7,000 m² (75,000 sq ft). Only the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian in Rome and the imperial baths at Trier are larger. You can walk through the changing room, the cold, warm and hot pools and the palaestra, and see the hypocaust that pushed hot air under the floors and up inside the walls. Admission is about €2.50, and the complex was in use for only about a century.

3. Sea Garden

Sea Garden is Varna’s seafront park and the place the city actually uses, running for well over a kilometre along the clifftop above the beach. The park was laid out from the 1880s and given its present form by the Czech gardener Anton Novak, and it is protected as a monument of landscape architecture. Inside it you will find the zoo, the Natural History Museum, the Maritime Museum, the Copernicus planetarium, the dolphinarium, an open-air theatre and a run of cafes facing the water. Entry to the park is free; the attractions inside it each charge separately.

4. Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin

The Cathedral of the Assumption is the largest church in Varna and the building the city puts on its postcards. It stands on St Cyril and St Methodius Square in the centre and was consecrated on 30 August 1886, built to mark Bulgaria’s liberation from Ottoman rule and to serve as the seat of the Varna and Preslav diocese. The style is a heavy neo-Byzantine, and the wood-carved iconostasis came from the Debar school of Macedonian carvers. Entry is free, services are open to visitors, and dressing modestly is expected.

5. Aladzha Monastery

Aladzha Monastery is a medieval monastery cut straight into a limestone cliff, and it is the most atmospheric thing within reach of the city. The complex sits 17 km (10.6 mi) north of central Varna and 3 km (1.9 mi) inland from Golden Sands, carved into a karst wall about 25 m (82 ft) high inside the Golden Sands Nature Park. Monks of the hesychast tradition lived here from the 12th century, possibly into the early 18th. The name is Ottoman Turkish for “colourful” and refers to murals that have almost entirely gone. Summer evenings bring a light-and-sound show; check the site for the current schedule.

6. Pobiti Kamani, the Stone Forest

Pobiti Kamani is a field of natural stone columns 18 km (11.2 mi) west of Varna that looks like the ruin of something built. The name means “planted stones”, the columns stand up to about 10 m (33 ft) tall and range from hollow tubes to solid cylinders, and the site spreads across roughly 13 km² (5 sq mi) in several groups either side of Beloslav Lake. Geologists still argue about how they formed, with coral reefs and gas seepage among the theories. It is often described as Bulgaria’s only desert, which is fair; it is not Europe’s, which is a claim other guides repeat. The site has been protected since 1938 and admission is about €2.50.

7. Balchik Palace and the botanical garden

Balchik Palace is a Romanian queen’s seaside retreat 40 km (25 mi) up the coast and the best half-day trip out of Varna. Queen Marie of Romania had the complex built between 1926 and 1937 while southern Dobruja was Romanian, mixing Balkan and Ottoman forms across a set of villas, a chapel, a wine cellar and a holy spring stepping down to the sea. The botanical garden below it is run by Sofia University, holds around 2,000 plant species and keeps a cactus collection usually described as the second largest in Europe after Monaco’s. The palace is about €7.50 for adults, the garden a fraction of that, and intercity buses run from Varna bus station.

8. Varna Aquarium and Black Sea Museum

The Varna Aquarium is the country’s only marine biological station and the place to understand what actually lives in the Black Sea. It sits at 4 Primorski Boulevard on the edge of Sea Garden and holds more than 140 species: Black Sea fish, Mediterranean and freshwater species, molluscs, crabs and small sharks. The museum half covers Black Sea oceanography and the history of researching it, which is more interesting than it sounds given the sea’s dead lower layer. Adults pay about €2, children under 6 about €0.50.

9. National Maritime Museum

The National Maritime Museum tells the story of a coast that has been fought over continuously for 2,500 years. The museum was founded in 1923 and stands in Sea Garden, with ship models, navigation instruments, marine paintings and finds from Black Sea wrecks, plus a yard of naval hardware outside. Its best exhibit is the torpedo boat Drazki, which hit the Ottoman cruiser Hamidiye on 12 November 1912 and has sat here since 1957. Bulgaria’s navy is headquartered in Varna, which is why the collection is here rather than in Sofia. Adult tickets run about €2.50.

10. Ethnographic Museum

The Ethnographic Museum shows how people in this region actually lived before the resorts, and it occupies a 19th-century house that is worth seeing on its own. The museum is at 21 Slivnitsa Boulevard in the centre, in a National Revival merchant’s home, and its rooms are given over to costume, weaving, farming and fishing tools, and the crafts of the Varna hinterland. It is small, it takes under an hour, and it costs about €1.50 for adults.

11. Retro Museum

The Retro Museum is a hangar of socialist-era cars, household objects and waxworks, and it is the most purely entertaining museum in Varna. The museum occupies 4,000 m² (43,000 sq ft) inside the Grand Mall on Akademik Andrei Saharov street, and covers Bulgarian life from 1944 to 1989. More than 50 restored cars sit on the floor, Volgas, Moskviches, Škodas and Trabants, along with Simson and Balkan motorbikes, and wax figures of Todor Zhivkov, Leonid Brezhnev and Fidel Castro stand among them. Adults pay about €7.50, children up to 18 about €5.

12. Varna State Opera

Varna State Opera is one of the oldest opera companies in Bulgaria and it performs in a grand building on Nezavisimost Square. The company dates from the late 19th century and its theatre, which it shares with the Varna Philharmonic, sits at the top of the city’s main pedestrian street. Tickets are cheap by Western European standards, typically running from about €10 to €30 ($11 to $33, £9 to £26) depending on the production and the seat. The Varna Summer International Music Festival, running through June and July, is the busiest time to catch something here.

13. Clock Tower

The Clock Tower is Varna’s oldest surviving civic building and it stands on the edge of the old market square. The tower is 24 m (79 ft) tall, was designed by the architect Sava Dimitrievich for the municipality in the 1880s and was originally a fire watchtower, which is why it looks out over the whole centre. Its clock mechanism came from England and was installed a couple of years after the tower itself. It is free, it takes two minutes, and it sits within a short walk of both the Roman Thermae and the Archaeological Museum.

14. St Athanasius Orthodox Church

St Athanasius is the small working church next to the Roman Thermae, and it is the one to look into if you want an ordinary Bulgarian parish rather than a cathedral. The church stands at 19 Graf Ignatiev Street, was built in 1838 on the foundations of an older church, and keeps a set of well-preserved icons. It is part of the Varna and Veliki Preslav diocese and it runs community support work for local families. Entry is free.

15. Festa Dolphinarium

Festa Dolphinarium is the only dolphinarium in Bulgaria, and it has been running in Sea Garden since 19 August 1984. The show lasts 40 minutes, is narrated in Bulgarian, English, Russian and German, and runs between one and four times a day depending on the season. Adults pay about €10, children aged 3 to 12 about €5. Captive-cetacean displays are contested and several European countries have banned them, so this is a choice to make with that in mind rather than an automatic stop.

16. Varna Zoo

Varna Zoo is a small municipal zoo inside Sea Garden, and it is priced accordingly at roughly €1.50 for adults. The zoo keeps around 70 species, among them llamas, a camel, big cats, pelicans and black swans, across a compact site in the park. It works as a 45-minute stop for young children rather than a destination in itself, and it is a short walk from the dolphinarium and the Maritime Museum.

17. Butterfly House

The Butterfly House is a heated tropical greenhouse full of live butterflies at St Constantine and Helena, the spa resort just north of the city. The building sits at 45th Street in the resort, close to the botanical garden, and is planted and misted to imitate a rainforest, with a pool, a waterfall and carp and turtles under the foliage. Guides talk visitors through the life cycle and there are usually pupae close to emerging. Adults pay about €5.50, children about €3.50.

18. Aquapolis

Aquapolis is Bulgaria’s original water park and the reason many families base themselves at Golden Sands rather than in the city. The park covers 40,000 m² (10 acres) in the north-west of the Golden Sands resort, holds up to 3,000 people and is built in a Mediterranean style that keeps the surrounding pine forest inside the site. It splits into an adult zone with a lazy river and relaxation pool, a children’s zone and an extreme zone of steeper slides. A day ticket runs around €19 ($21, £17) including a sunbed and parasol, and it is open only through the summer season.

19. Golden Sands Central Beach

Golden Sands Central Beach is the main resort beach, 17 km (10.6 mi) north of central Varna and reachable by city bus. The sand here is fine and pale, the water shelves gently, lifeguards work the central stretch and the beach has parking, showers, toilets and lounger hire along with accessible entry points. Behind it sits a wall of hotels and a pedestrianised strip of restaurants and bars, and behind that the Golden Sands Nature Park. It is free to walk onto; loungers and umbrellas are not. Almost every bed here is in a resort hotel, so check what the Golden Sands hotels are going for on Booking.com before committing to a package, since the all-inclusive rate and the room-only rate are often a long way apart.

20. Kabakum Beach

Kabakum Beach is the quieter alternative to Golden Sands, about a kilometre of sand a few minutes south of the resort. The name means “crumbly sand”, an embankment splits the beach into two halves, and the crowd is more local and more family-oriented than at the main resort. Beach volleyball, jet skis and ring rides operate in summer, and there are stalls, small hotels and cheap food behind the sand. Buses stop at Pisatel, Horizont and Zhurnalist, about 10 minutes’ walk above the beach.

21. Varna Karting Track

The Varna Karting Track is the largest outdoor go-kart circuit in Bulgaria, out in the Vinica district on the north side of the city. The track runs 1,050 m (0.65 mi), is 9 m wide and has 15 turns, and it uses the RaceFacer timing and safety system, which posts your lap times to an app afterwards. Buggies and paintball run on the same site, along with a bar. A 15-minute session costs roughly €20 ($22, £17). Children over 1.40 m (4 ft 7 in) can drive alone with a parent’s signed consent, and it is not suitable if you have a spinal injury, a heart condition or are pregnant.

Where to stay in Varna

Stay in the city centre if you are here for the museums and the old town, and at Golden Sands or St Constantine and Helena if you are here for the beach, because the two are 17 km apart and the bus between them takes 40 minutes in August traffic. The centre puts the cathedral, the Roman Thermae, the Archaeological Museum and Sea Garden all within a 15-minute walk of each other, and it stays open out of season, which the resorts do not. Trakata, between the two, is the compromise and is quieter than either. Prices roughly double from mid-July to the end of August. Compare hotels and apartments in Varna and Golden Sands on Booking.com before you commit to a resort, because a central Varna room out of the resort strip is usually cheaper and better placed.

Tours and day trips from Varna

The trips worth booking are the ones that solve a transport problem: Aladzha Monastery combined with the Stone Forest, Balchik Palace with Cape Kaliakra, and the Madara Rider and Shumen fortress inland. Each of those means two or three separate bus connections done independently, and the coastal ones are awkward outside the summer timetable. Current options and prices are below.

What to eat in Varna

Eat fish in Varna, because this is a port city and the rest of Bulgarian cooking is available everywhere else in the country. The 8 dishes to look for are listed below, and all of them turn up on ordinary menus rather than in tourist restaurants.

1. Tsatsa. Deep-fried Black Sea sprats, eaten whole with chips and lemon, and the single most Varna thing on any menu.
2. Ribena chorba. Fish soup made with whatever saltwater catch came in, thickened and sharpened with vinegar.
3. Shopska salata. Tomato, cucumber, onion and roasted pepper under a heap of grated sirene, the white brined cheese; order it before anything else arrives.
4. Tarator. Cold yoghurt soup with cucumber, garlic, dill and walnuts, served in summer and genuinely cooling.
5. Banitsa. Filo pastry layered with sirene and egg, sold in every bakery before 10am and eaten standing up.
6. Kavarma. Slow-cooked pork or chicken with onions, peppers and mushrooms, served in the clay pot it cooked in.
7. Lyutenitsa. Roasted pepper, tomato and aubergine relish, spread on bread with cheese as a starter.
8. Meshana skara. The mixed grill of kebapche, kyufte and pork, ordered when there are several of you.

More on the wider cuisine sits in our guide to the best foods to eat in Bulgaria.

Varna practicalities

Varna is straightforward for an English-speaking visitor, and the two things that changed recently are the currency and nothing else. The details you actually need are listed below.

• Currency. The euro, since 1 January 2026. Bulgaria was the 21st country to join the euro area, the lev circulated alongside it through January and stopped being legal tender on 1 February 2026, and old lev notes and coins can still be swapped at the Bulgarian National Bank without a deadline. Cards are accepted almost everywhere and ATMs are common.
• Language. Bulgarian, written in Cyrillic. Street signs in the centre and menus in tourist areas carry Latin transliterations, and younger Bulgarians and hospitality staff generally speak some English. Russian is widely understood by older people. Learning to read the alphabet takes about an hour and pays for itself immediately.
• Time. Eastern European Time, UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. Varna is on the same clock as Athens, Helsinki and Sofia, and 1 hour ahead of Berlin, Paris and Rome.
• Plugs. Type C and Type F, 230V at 50Hz. Anything built for continental Europe works as it is; American and British devices need an adapter.
• Safety. Varna is as safe as most European cities of its size. The usual precautions apply on crowded beaches and in the nightlife strips at Golden Sands, where pickpocketing and inflated bar bills are the common complaints.
• How long to stay. Two days for the city, three if you want a beach day, four if you also want Balchik and Cape Kaliakra.

Getting to and from Varna

Fly into Varna Airport, which sits about 10 km (6.2 mi) west of the centre; bus 409 runs into town in around 20 minutes and carries on to St Constantine and Helena and Golden Sands. Sofia is 440 km (273 mi) away: the drive takes 5 to 6 hours on the A2 Hemus motorway, the train takes 7 to 8 hours and is slow rather than uncomfortable, and the Sofia flight takes an hour and is usually the sensible choice unless you want to stop at Veliko Tarnovo on the way. Buses to Balchik, Kavarna and Burgas leave from the main bus station beside the Grand Mall. For the wider country, see our guides to Bulgaria, the top places to visit in Bulgaria, the most interesting facts about Bulgaria and the capital, Sofia.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 5 tips below come from rechecking Varna’s attractions, prices and transport after Bulgaria’s changeover to the euro, and each one contradicts something still printed on other guides to the city.

1. Bring euros and stop looking for a currency exchange. Bulgaria joined the euro area on 1 January 2026, the lev circulated alongside it through January and stopped being legal tender on 1 February 2026. Any guide that tells you to change money on arrival, or that euros are not officially accepted, was written before the changeover. Old lev notes and coins can still be swapped at the Bulgarian National Bank, with no deadline.
2. Keep Sunny Beach off a Varna itinerary. It sits 94 km (58.4 mi) south of the city beside Burgas, which has its own airport, and it is not a day trip from Varna in any useful sense. Lists that file Sunny Beach, or a water park with a Sunny Beach address, under things to do in Varna have copied a location they never checked.
3. Take bus 409 from the airport. It runs the 10 km (6.2 mi) into the centre in about 20 minutes and then carries on to St Constantine and Helena and Golden Sands, so a resort stay does not need a paid transfer either.
4. Set your watch for a clock change. Bulgaria does observe daylight saving, running on UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, despite sources that state a flat UTC+2 all year. It matters for an early flight or a booked tour in the last week of March or October.
5. Do not repeat the Europe’s-only-desert line about Pobiti Kamani. The stone columns 18 km (11.2 mi) west of the city are described in Bulgarian sources as Bulgaria’s only desert, and that is the claim that holds. Europe has others, Tabernas in Spain and Oleshky Sands in Ukraine among them.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the team covers Bulgaria for independent travellers, including the Varna museums that hold the Necropolis gold, the Aladzha and Balchik day trips worth booking a guide for, and the hotels in the city and at Golden Sands. Admission prices and opening arrangements are rechecked when they move, and this page was updated after Bulgaria’s changeover to the euro.