SofiaTravel Guide

The gold-domed cathedral is Sofia's icon and one of the largest Orthodox churches in the Balkans, built to honour the Russian soldiers who died in Bulgaria's liberation.

Slaveykov Square has been Sofia's open-air bookshop for decades.

On Vitosha's lower slopes, this small medieval church is a UNESCO World Heritage Site thanks to its remarkably lifelike thirteenth-century frescoes, painted generations before the Italian Renaissance.

In a garden suburb at the mountain's foot stands a small medieval church whose 13th-century frescoes are so startlingly lifelike they are often called a Renaissance before the Renaissance.

On the square flanking Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, dealers lay out icons, medals, cameras, banknotes and mysterious brassware — a flea market with a museum's worth of 20th-century Bulgarian history priced to haggle.

The most storied address in the city is the grand hotel on Sveta Nedelya Square — long known as the Sheraton and now operating as the Sofia Balkan Palace — a marble-columned classic that shares its block with the 4th-century Rotunda of St George, standing in its courtyard among Roman remains.

Along the ceremonial spine of Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard, between the National Assembly and Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, cluster the city's other big names — including an InterContinental whose upper rooms look toward the cathedral, and, nearby, a well-known design-led boutique whose rooftop bar frames the golden domes directly.

Around the City Garden and the Ivan Vazov National Theatre, a handful of polished hotels — the well-regarded Grand Hotel Sofia among them — face the capital's loveliest square: chess players under the trees, the theatre's gilded facade, cafés on every corner.

Along and around the pedestrian Vitosha Boulevard, and in the gentler streets toward Tsar Shishman, smaller boutique and apartment-style hotels put you amid the city's best cafés, bakeries and independent shops — with the mountain closing the view at the boulevard's end.