Country High Point #11 – Bulgaria – Musala (2925m)

Updated September 10, 2025
Posted in Country High Points
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The highest point of Bulgaria was the 1st peak in this double header Balkans trip alongside Greece. Musala was going to be the tallest hike I’ve completed so far.

Tom joined me on this trip, we’d been talking about what high points to tackle for a while and both Bulgaria and Greece made the most logistical sense.

We arrived from Manchester to Thessaloniki around 11am local time and headed over to the car hire place which was a shuttle ride away. Everything went fine until we were walked out to our noble steed for the long weekend, which was a literal piece of shit Micra, with polystyrene shoved into the bumper and parts hanging off. The nice hire car lady laughed as she gave us the keys and said it was nicknamed ‘The Beast’

The plan was this:

Drive straight to Borovets in Bulgaria
Head up late afternoon and stay at the Ledeno Ezero Hut – which to be fair was only a couple of hundred metres from the peak
Complete the hike early hours of the morning
Head straight down and drive to Litochoro, the little mountain town in Greece, ready to blitz Mount Olympus the day after

With timings not quite going to plan, traffic in the way, we called it to swerve the hut as we didn’t fancy hiking up in the pitch black, so a local hotel for the night was agreed between us, which actually worked out class as we were able to arrive in Borovets, which in winter is a busy ski town, grab a scran (pizza & a beer) and get an early night having been up for the flight at 2am.

The hotel even prepared us a packed lunch as we were leaving before breakfast, well in lads, map and route details below.

Hiking Data

Start:

Musala Trail Head

Difficulty:

3/5

Distance:

23.25km

GPX File:

Download GPX File

Summit:

Musala (2925m)

Date:

23-08-0025

Ascent:

1500m

Time:

7 Hours

Weather:

Sunny

What 3 Words:

///temporally.dropping.comedians

Route Map

Details

Musala Hike

Route Overview

After grabbing our packed lunch, fruit and butties…winner. It was a 5 minute drive from the hotel up to the start of the trailhead. There’s a good load of parking up and down the road and pull-ins alongside the trailhead, we were there early so no issues there.

Then off we went to tackle Musala.

A straight forward out and back route, with great views of Rila National Park appearing with more and more elevation gain.

We did this at a really solid and steady pace, hitting the Musala Hut and lower lake in just over 2 hours which was our first proper break. The whole trail is really well marked with signposts and arrows painted at every turn, so it’s pretty much impossible to go off track, unless you’re a bit of a divvy.

It took us around another 45 minutes to get to our previously booked bed for the night at Ledeno Ezero Hut, so in theory we could have got up before dark the night before, but catching up on sleep and showering off flight sweat was defo the right decision.

It definitely started getting steeper on the final stretch, we spent about 25 minutes once at the top admiring the views, well most of them, apart from some helmet posing topless, arms clenched and asking his poor mate to try again and again to capture the perfect vascular angle of his average physique (better than mine tbf, but I’m sound so…) I was tempted to lash my nectarine at his grid from my Bulgarian packed lunch, but it was too nice to chuck away.

We made it back down to the car around 2:15pm, a quick drink, snack and change and then it was back in the car for another 5 hour drive towards Litochoro. Ready to hit Zeus’s throne the next morning.