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"Bansko Is One of the Shiniest Ski Resorts..."
Focus English News, 05.02.2005
London. In the late 1980s, Bulgaria's communist government built a no-frills ski lodge for students and installed a creakingly slow chair-lift on the slopes above Bansko, a small town overlooked by the peaks of the Pirin mountain range, reads today’s issue of the Financial Times. Facilities at the "Akademika" were spartan, but memories of sparkling powder snow and some of the longest pistes in Europe stayed with the IT and engineering graduates who emigrated to find jobs during the early transition years. Now they're back, transformed into Bulgaria's new entrepreneurial class, with cash to spend on a weekend ski home. The place to look? Bansko, no longer a down-at-heel mountain hideaway but one of the shiniest ski resorts in "new" Europe. Ulen, a Sofia-based company, has invested EUR 40 million (USD 31,250,000; BGN 78,000,000) to install a state-of-the art ski facility, with equipment specifically designed for piste and weather conditions on the Pirin slopes. Sebastian Kinsman, a UK bank-employee-turned-property-developer, settled in Bulgaria because "the skiing is really exceptional" and quickly decided that his business should focus on ski homes. Kinsman says he chose to build at Bansko rather than Borovets, a communist-era ski-resort an hour from Sofia, or Pamporovo, two hours south of Plovdiv in the Rodopi mountains, because of the quality of its ski facilities and the attractions of Pirin national park, a Unesco world heritage site, reads the Financial Times. see source
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