A walk in Bulgaria #1 Park and castle Vrana

Hi everyone!
This is my first post in this site and I am going to take you for a walk in the most popular and beautiful places in my country-Bulgaria. My first post will be about the most beautiful and European park in the capital city Sofia- the national park and castle of Vrana. It is situated in a very quiet and gorgeous area in the surroundings of the town. It is easily accessible with the public transport and its one of the parks in the city with huge historical and recreational values. I will share with you some of the history and the beauty of this place. Hope you like it and visit it someday!

The Vrana Park is created under the influence of European landscape parks.

For over 40 years, the park's creators have managed to build a magnificent park ensemble. For this purpose, as "building material", they use decorative vegetation.

Impressive is the wide variety of 821 tree, shrub and grass species of 118 families and 435 genera in less than 100 hectares.

All of this determines its high artistic value as one of the first works of park art in Bulgaria.
Vrana Park is a significant work of landscape park art, created in Bulgaria during the first half of the 20th century. In his artistic qualities, he does not retreat to the famous landscape parks created in Europe in the 19th century. It represented a part of an estate of 140 hectares, belonging to the Bulgarian kings Ferdinand I and Boris III.

In 2001 the estate was given by the son of Tsar Boris III, Simeon Koburgotski to the Sofia City Municipality. It is located 11 km from the center of the capital in a very beautiful and quiet area.

The construction of the Vrana Park took place in 1900, 22 years after the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turkish yoke. Its creation takes place in an environment when the garden-park art was at the very beginning of its development.

At the beginning of its development were the political, economic and cultural life of the young Bulgarian state at that time. The construction of the park covered not only a long period of time (43 years), but it was connected with the first stage of its creation (1900-1909) with great difficulty.

This is explained by the lack of seedlings due to the lack of greenhouses and nurseries for the production of flowers and tree-shrub vegetation. A large number of saplings and flower seeds were delivered to the park from all continents. That is why Vrana Park has so far a diverse assortment of plant species.

The site where the Vrana Park was being built was a bare plain deforested during the Ottoman times. Only the nearby Iskar River has revived the surrounding monotonous landscape to some extent.

Vrana Park was designed for the royal family as a summer residence. This fact has predetermined to a certain extent its intimate-landscape character: in it the woods and tree groups, the flower meadows, rock gardens, lakes, alleys and paths are attributed to forms close to the natural ones, which was typical of the majority of the European landscape parks in the past.

Inauguration of the Vrana Park was attended by gardeners whose names did not appear on the lists of famous park-builders in Europe, such as Kent in England, Pukler in Germany, Gonzágo in Russia and others.