Varna Mineral Springs

Varna Mineral Springs serves Bulgaria's 'Sea Capital,' a Black Sea port city of extraordinary historical depth whose most remarkable distinction is the Varna Gold Treasure — discovered in a local cemetery in 1972, it is the oldest collection of worked gold artifacts in the world, dating to approximately 4,500 BC and testifying to a sophisticated and wealthy civilization flourishing in the Black Sea region during the Chalcolithic period, thousands of years before the Egyptian pharaohs began adorning themselves with gold. The city has been continuously inhabited since Neolithic times, known as Odessos in the Greek period when it became a major Black Sea trading colony, and today serves as the major Black Sea resort hub of Bulgaria with a tradition of thermal and mineral water use running alongside its coastal tourism. The oligomineral springs, flowing from the geological substrate of the Varna region, provide mineral therapeutic bathing in a city where the timescale of human settlement — measured from the first gold-workers of 6,500 years ago to the present — gives every feature of the landscape an unusual depth of historical resonance.