Wild camping in Bulgaria: is it legal? (2026)

In Bulgarian reserves and maintained reserves the act flips the burden: every activity is prohibited except those it enumerates — protection, science, passage on marked paths, firefighting. Neither bivouac nor tent is on the list, so legally they don't exist there. The right to pass on the marked path is exactly that: to pass.

The same sentence appears twice in the act — for national parks (art. 21(13)) and nature parks (art. 31(6)): 'bivakuvane' and fire-lighting banned outside determined places. Who determines the places: each park's management plan, with its zones, methods and conditions. The rule is clear; the specific park's current map is the half you're missing.

Fine: 500–5,000 leva for an individual breaching the regime (art. 81(1)); 5–100 leva where the case is classified minor (art. 81(3)) — two distinct routes, not one range.

The national act regulates 'bivakuvane' — and no current text defines whether every pitched tent falls inside that word. Parks that want clarity supply it themselves: Rila expressly says 'bivouac and tenting'; others stay silent. Where the park doesn't name it, the tent sits unclassified at national level: unconfirmed — which is a gap, not a permission.

The Bulgarian forest act opens forest territories to everyone — free access, at your own risk, following the administration's and owner's instructions. On staying the night, tent or no tent, the text says nothing either way: unconfirmed. What it does say, unqualified: fire in the forest is banned save the ordinance's cases.

• Where forest overlaps protected territory, declaration orders and management plans take over — back to the architecture above.

Sofia's park has camping mapped to the metre: per its management plan, it's admitted in the directed-regime zone along the Struma river between Bosnek and Chuypetlovo, along the Kurtova river from the Plana road to the forest boundary, and along the trail from Shumnatitsa to the Dobri Dol river — three days maximum in one spot. Outside those three corridors, the national designated-places rule.

• The plan holding those corridors up is the 2015–2024 one, and in April 2026 the ministry terminated the update procedure — the old one still governs, but this is the most-watched point on the Bulgarian page.

The park of the Seven Lakes speaks Bulgaria's plainest: 'bivouacking and tenting are permitted only at the places determined and marked for that purpose' — both words, in writing, in its official visitor rules. The marked-site inventory is live: park map and signs before counting on any of them.

In Pirin the legal condition is the national one — bivouac at determined places only — and the park itself points to the act, the declaration order and the active management plan. What we couldn't verify at an official source is the current inventory of those places: the condition is clear, the map isn't. Ask the park directorate before the night.

The internet repeats that at Pirin you may pitch so-many tents beside each hut. Something like that may exist in some order — but we found it in no current official source, and a hut's existence doesn't turn its clearing into a designated camping area. Until the order or plan says it by name: unconfirmed.