There is a certain type of walk you set off on thinking “we’ll stretch our legs for a couple of hours and head home”, and somewhere along the way you realise you have spent half a day outside and you are as pleased with yourself as a kid. The Trun eco trail – or more precisely, the eco trail through the Erma River Gorge – is exactly that type. A bit of a car park, a bit of rock, tunnels (yes, actual tunnels!), forest, water, a fishpond halfway through, and at the end a set of views that make you forget you only came out to kill some time. Read on and we’ll get into all of it 🙂
As usual, we are hunting for the less popular destinations – the ones the internet greets with silence rather than information. Trun is one of those places whose name everyone has heard, but where very few people have actually been. Well, we went. The route starts about 3–4 km north of the town of Trun, on the road towards the village of Lomnitsa – here is the car park at the start of the eco trail. And since the information about the route itself is fairly thin on the ground, we’ll stretch the story out properly, as it deserves 😀
Quick facts
| Length | Just over 6 km (circular route) |
| Time needed | Around 3 hours at an unhurried pace, with breaks and photo stops; with a stop at the Fishpond it easily becomes 4 hours |
| Difficulty | Easy to moderate |
| Elevation gain | Around 330–350 m |
| Altitude | The panoramic platform (Tsarkvishteto peak) sits at around 800 m; the trail itself runs between 600 and 1000 m |
| Route type | Circular |
| Best season | Spring to autumn; in summer, go early in the morning or towards the evening, and come prepared |
| Good for kids | Yes – mildly challenging in places, but walkable |
| Parking and fees | Free parking, no entrance fee |
The Erma River Gorge at a glance
Before we set off – a small piece of history to set the mood. The place has its own legend, as any self-respecting gorge should. It tells of an impossible love between two young people, and of the gorge that was left behind when it ended badly:
A mother’s curse fell on them and they turned into two cliffs on either side of the Erma River – always close to one another, yet never together. The waters of the river were fed by the tears of the two who had been parted.
So the two crags leaning over the river are called Tsarkvishteto and Zhilav Kamak. Romantic, dramatic and suitably grim – exactly the way we like it 🙂
This feels like the right moment for a useful practical note as well. On the drive in, a few minutes before the car park, you can collect stamp No. 39 from the 100 National Tourist Sites. You cannot really miss the sign – there is a small shop-stall right there, even though the website of the Bulgarian Tourist Union points you somewhere else. If you are filling in the little book too, the Fotinovo Waterfalls are another site worth the detour, and they sit close to the area around Batak and Peshtera, which is a good excuse to turn one stamp into a whole weekend.
Trun is about an hour and a half from Sofia – here are more ideas for day trips from the capital, if this route is your kind of thing.
The car park and the start
We start from the car park. There is room for the car, there is a mountain, there is a blue sky – in other words, the classic beginning, where everything looks suspiciously easy and you think “right, we’ll wrap this up in an hour”. Make a note of that confidence, because we are going to need it later 😀
And before all that – the entrance to the car park is a brilliant picnic spot. There are gazebos and proper built stone barbecues. It is also perfectly good just to come, sit down by the river and have a long, unhurried chat with nowhere in particular to be.
First steps – forest, rocks and tunnels
And here comes the good part. You set off along the path and it very quickly shows you why you bothered to drive all the way out here. The trail runs through forest, past cliffs and – pay attention – through tunnels. Real tunnels, cut into the rock. They stand there as if someone once decided that going around things is for boring people and ran the route straight through the mountain instead. Slightly mysterious, entirely safe, and with the rock faces around you constantly reminding you that you are in the mountains and not on a stroll between two apartment blocks.
Along the way you pass a gazebo, walk beside the river, and cross the kind of rocky stretches that photograph themselves. A little rest, a little staring, a little “hang on, let me take one more” – and on you go.
The sign – before you set off at random
There is a board with the route on it partway along. Personally, I belong to the group of people who set off first and check the map afterwards, so a sign like this is more or less my only alibi that I did my research in advance 😀 You photograph it, just in case, and then carry on confidently in an unknown direction. Not that you won’t end up pulling out the navigation again later, but at least your conscience is clean.
In practice, the route described here continues from that post in the direction of the Fishpond. There is also the option of carrying on towards Bankya and doing a completely different walk, which brings you out earlier on the road between Trun and the trailhead. We are sticking with the white-green-white markings towards Panorama Tsarkvishteto.
The Fishpond – the pause in the middle
Somewhere around the halfway mark you reach Fishpond Trun. And as the name suggests, here the water is not just decoration – it is part of the whole business. There is an information board and there is a restaurant, which I can recommend. The prices are reasonable for the setting, the portions are respectable and the food is enviably good. There is a garlic bread. If they bring it out before the main course, you will have eaten your fill ahead of schedule – it is that good. There is a water channel and a corner where you can sit down, get your breath back and decide whether you came here to stretch your legs or to spend the whole day outdoors. I vote for the second.
One warning of a practical nature: the bridge by the fishpond is private, and if the restaurant is closed it may be locked – which complicates the circular route. On good spring and summer weekends it is usually open, but if you are going on a weekday, it is worth checking first (location and contact details here). After all, the point of an eco trail is to walk it, not to set a personal record for getting through it quickly.
Back along the circular route
After the Fishpond we carry on along the circular route. The scenery changes, but the feeling stays the same – forest, open ground, a path and more than enough reasons to stop for a photo. Even if you have promised yourself that this time you are not going to photograph every tree, rock and cloud, you will end up photographing every tree, rock and cloud. Tested and confirmed.
Oh, and there was one close encounter with the local fauna – something that looked suspiciously like a tick landed on a leaf right next to me, evidently also taking an interest in the route. It was not invited, but clearly it liked the place too. I mention it not to scare you, but so that you don’t forget the repellent and a quick check after the walk – the mountains are still the mountains 🙂
The finale – the panoramic platform
And then come the views. This is the exact point where you say to yourself “fine, so it was worth the walking, the climbing and the stopping at every bend”. From the panoramic platform – the peak is Tsarkvishteto, if you care about names, at around 800 m above sea level – you can see the Erma valley and the surrounding mountains, while the sky, as usual, does its best to make everything a little more poetic than strictly necessary.
The platform is the logical finale of the walk. A bit of looking, a bit of photographing and a bit of silence – because sometimes there is no need to explain much. If you like finishing a walk on a viewpoint, there are more hiking ideas around Bulgaria in the same spirit.
Heading back to the car park
And so – back towards the car park. The walk comes to an end, but the photos stay behind to remind us that next time we could set off in the same direction again. And to be honest, I am already thinking about it.
The route in Garmin
Since we are here for practical travel, here is the map from Garmin. The main numbers are gathered up in the quick facts at the top, but here you can see the shape of the route itself – a loop of a little over 6 km with around 330–350 m of climbing, which is comfortably done in about 3 hours.
The Trun eco trail is one of those walks that doesn’t burden you with the feeling that you have to conquer something at any cost. You simply walk, look, stop, carry on, and come home pleasantly tired. And that, at least for me, is a pretty good definition of a successful day outdoors. 🙂 If you are after something similar in another corner of the country, the Struilitsa eco trail near Devin also runs beside water and through a canyon.
