It was like Benidorm with snow,” someone told me when I mentioned I was heading to Bansko for a ski holiday.
As first impressions go, it wasn’t far off. After the two-and-a-half-hour transfer from Sofia, we arrived long after dark to a joyless post-Soviet holiday complex that looked more like a deserted theme park than a resort. Hunger pushed us straight out the door.
The strip beneath the gondola could have been lifted straight from the TV show named after Spain’s most notorious party town. Neon signs flashed promises of ice-cold beer and even colder Jägermeister, while Europop thudded from open doors. A barbecue joint broadcast its sizzling grills on a flatscreen outside, as if daring passers-by to come underground.
And then there were the vending machines, each inexplicably showcasing a single giant pink teddy bear as its only prize. It was a world away from the chocolate-box Alpine villages of France or Austria – less fairy tale, more fever dream.
Bansko Bulgaria
Consistently voted the cheapest place in Europe for a ski holiday, Bansko has grown in popularity with British tourists in recent years, drawing in snow bunnies hoping to carve couloirs for a fraction of the ever-increasing prices in the Alps. Although this growing influx of new visitors is impacting prices in Bansko, too, a 2024 Post Office survey showed that, for the first time in a decade, Bansko and nearby Borovets have been toppled as the cheapest ski holidays in Europe by Italian destination Bardonecchia.
Nevertheless, Bansko was purported to cost just a fraction of most of the popular resorts in Europe. In fact, when crunching the numbers for a trip including accommodation, flights, ski hire and passes, a holiday to Bansko was going to cost almost half of what it would to go to Morzine, the town we usually ski in. And it came with the added benefit of getting to see what one of Europe’s cheapest ski resorts is really like.
While our first 20 minutes wandering through town was a little like being repeatedly slapped over the head by a horror reel of hellish nights out, once you get a little further down Pirin Street, the main drag through town, the replica English pubs complete with bright red telephone box doors, sex shops (yes, really) and cavernous nightclubs ebb in favour of stores selling local crafts, antique shops and classic mehanas – the Bulgarian take on a taverna or trattoria.
It’s one of these eateries that we set the coordinates for, seeking a necessary palate cleanser from looped repeats of Calvin Harris remixes.
Baryakova Tavern is a classic, log cabin-style restaurant full of tables draped in classic shevitza blankets and piled high with plates of sizzling grilled meat, clay pots of slowly braised beans and plates of shopska salad covered in a layer of grated sirene cheese. Bulgarian food, at first glance, has echoes of Greek cuisine, with a penchant for cucumber and tomato salads, slow-cooked meats and sarmi – cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and rice.
There are also hints of Turkish and Middle Eastern flavours in there. It’s vibrant and flavourful and exactly the kind of hearty fare you want to warm you up on a sub-zero mountainous evening after a day on the slopes. Dinner for three, including enough drinks to give us sufficient Dutch courage to tackle the main drag again, came to just 40 quid.
Balkan mountains
Dinner is all very well and good – but we’re there to ski. The next morning, we navigated icy streets across town to Mega Ski Center. There are a few reasons we picked it from the many others in town – free coffee in the morning and wine or whisky when you return in the evening, glowing reviews from numerous other patrons, and fair pricing – but its primary benefit turned out to be its location and relationship with the security guards – again, yes, really – at the gondola station. Sitting uphill from the gondola means you simply need to wander across Pirin Street to access the final section of the ski road, so that you can ski the short distance to the gondola doors rather than dragging your heavy gear through town.
The real benefit came from the shop’s questionable but effective queue-cutting method. Bansko’s budget status shows most clearly in the lift lines: with only one gondola serving the town (driving is an option, though traffic is almost as bad), waits can easily stretch past an hour at peak times. Unbeknownst to most tourists, however, there’s a back-door entrance for season ticket holders. Slipping the guys at Mega Ski an extra 20 lev a day prompted a quick phone call, a code word, and a fast track to the front. The longest we ever waited was five minutes – a system that would send most queue-loving Brits into meltdown.
That time-saving hack wasn’t just about an extra half-hour in bed; it was crucial for catching the best snow. Bansko is a compact resort, with just 75km of pistes across 21 runs, and conditions get chopped up quickly. One saving grace was the town’s cavernous nightclubs: as a party destination, many visitors favour a late start.
Combined with our MI5-style gondola access, it meant we had at least an hour each morning on freshly groomed slopes with barely another soul in sight. There’s plenty here to keep intermediates happy – sweeping reds with just enough gradient to thrill, blues that shade into red once they’re busy, and a few tree-lined favourites like the blue ten into red twelve, a wide-open corduroy playground. Best of all is the 16km home run, a meandering trail that carries you all the way back to town.
After midday, though, most of the peak conditions go out the window. The wide, blue run Number Five quickly becomes pockmarked with moguls and out-of-their-depth beginners struggling to tackle the relatively steep slope while navigating murky snow.
Lift queues stack up, and carving the slopes feels more like a game of whack-a-mole than peaceful, weightless freedom. It’s at this stage that we quickly learned our biggest Bansko lesson: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Bansko from overhead
Get your best skiing in before lunch, and wash down plates of meat and carbs with Jägerbombs and frothy pints of Kamenitza before wobbling to one of the umbrella bars that are dotted across the mountain to keep the party going in front of a DJ playing Eurovision tunes from a set of decks built into the back of a rainbow Hummer decked out as a skidoo.
If Bansko sounds like a party-induced hallucination, that’s probably because, in many ways, it is. Aside from the umbrella bars, après-ski tends to take place inside a thrumming log house-meets-nightclub situation at the bottom of the gondola, and the town curiously empties at 5pm every day as everyone heads off for their daily spa session. And yet, even amongst the madness, there are pockets of what feels like the real Bansko to be found here.
A series of classic restaurants line the ski run home – a far cry from the tunes and trays of shots on the mountain – where, in the case of Peshterite, a pure haven of peace, you can get lunch of a stein of beer and bean soup for £5. At mehanas like the one we visit on our first night and Kasapinova, where we get fed so much food and rakia by an enthusiastic Bulgarian man that we are almost unable to stand up afterwards, you get a feel for the authentic side of the town.
In shops like Beer Shop Shark and Pivoteka Craft Beer Mountain Base, too, you pick up the sloperider energy that tends to prevail in most mountain towns. And, after stumbling into The Bottle Wine Bar and Cellar, we got an education on Bulgarian wines from the immensely knowledgeable proprietor, accidentally finding ourselves still there two hours and as many bottles of wine later.
Even amongst the most Benidorm of it all, there’s fun to be had.
At Amigo Pub, a slogan-strewn bar with sticky floors and even stickier payment methods (it’s cash only), the in-house band Step by Step gets the dance floor roaring and the singer knocks back more whisky in one set than the most practised human body should be able to tolerate in one month.
If you can find it in your soul to tolerate questionable Ed Sheeran remixes, Happy End, the riotous après bar a few steps from the bottom of the gondola, is a haven of bad decisions and hysterical dancing that will spill you out a few hours later, not entirely sure if you enjoyed yourself, but laughing nonetheless.
So, is Europe’s almost-cheapest ski resort worth it? It’s complicated. Bansko is a riotous, theme park ride of a place. Once you settle into its rhythms and idiosyncrasies, it does seem to open itself up to you. We had some of the best mornings of skiing I’ve ever had on quiet slopes that are easy to navigate and quick to get to. Feasting on shopska salad and kavarma made for a pleasant change from the cheese and carb-laden feasts of the Alps, and, if you’re up for it, you’ll have some of the most hilarious nights out of your life. Just make sure your accommodation has a spa, and don’t forget to skip the queue.
