If you’re up for an adventure while in Vratsa, be sure to check out Vratsa Trails. They offer guided tours of the Vratsa Balkan — overlooking the Iskar Gorge — on two wheels.
Although the mountain bike enthusiasts making up the team of Vratsa Trails have been coming together to race and test their endurance for more than a decade and a half, the work of opening mountain cycling to the wider community began in earnest only in the past eight years. Since 2016, Valentino Katov, Emil Ivanov, and other volunteers from the club have cleaned, secured, and mapped nearly 160 km of mountain trails of varying difficulty, including the longest Enduro track in Bulgaria, reaching an altitude of 1,481 m in the majestic Vratsa Balkan Mountain. Thanks to their efforts, the area today is a more welcoming place for both endurance and leisure riders.
The team of Vratsa Trails will share their love of mountain and biking with anyone willing to try a new adventure, and their guided tours are a must for those who want an insider’s experience of Vratsa and its environs. Group bike tours, training sessions, and friendly meetups for more advanced riders are particularly popular.
Coming up this July is Chicks ’N Trails, an event for female mountain bikers. The annual mountain biking festival in Vratsa, Garvanets Bike Fest, will take place at the end of September, bringing together cyclists of various skill levels.
Several times a year, Vratsa Trails also organizes Dig & Ride get-togethers, which combine trail maintenance and mountain bike training. (For an event calendar, check out the club’s website or follow its Facebook page.)
“There’s really no better way to connect with the sights, sounds, and culture of a region than on two wheels,” according to the Vratsa Trails folks.
We’ll take their word for it.
Find out more about the Enduro cycling enthusiasts of Vratsa Trails from this short documentary from Lora Krumova and Maria Yotova’s MAD in BG series.
Support for Vratsa Trails is part of the America for Bulgaria Foundation’s long-term efforts to promote economic development in the Bulgarian North through entrepreneurship and tourism.
