This Saturday with more than 200 visitors from all over Bulgaria our local team from Rewilding Rhodopes marked the International Vulture Awareness Day.

Earlier this month new group of 13 cinereous vultures from Spain arrived in Rhodope Mountains rewilding area in Bulgaria. The black vulture – Europe’s largest and heaviest bird of prey returned to the Eastern Rhodopes after the first group of birds was released at the end of 2022.

A guidebook for the Rhodopes, prepared by the Dutch Crossbill Guides Foundation, is out of print and is already available for all travellers, nature lovers and explorers.

This weekend more than a hundred people celebrated this years World rewilding day with which took place over the weekend in Kardzhali.

Rewilding Rhodopes is currently looking for an Enterprise Officer who can continue to implement the strategy to support the sustainable socio-economic development of the Eastern Rhodopes.

Over the last few months, a total of 17 red deer and 96 fallow deer have been released into the Rhodope Mountains rewilding landscape in Bulgaria.

Rewilding Rhodopes is looking for a Rewilding officer (RO) – human-wildlife conflict mitigation (Full time employment contract) to complement its existing team in Bulgaria and work efficiently to achieve its goals.

Last week Rewilding Rhodopes team hosted the first rewilding officers gathering in Eastern Rhodopes. For a week representatives of nine rewilding lanscapes from all over Europe, including from Italy, Scotland, Romania, Ukraine, Germany, etc., exchanged rewilding experience and knowledge.

This maintains the upward growth trend in the birds’ population, with two more young, 71 vultures leaving their nests in this part of Bulgaria in summer last year.

Following Eastern Rhodopes’ continuous growth as a tourist destination, one of the main objectives for Rewilding Rhodopes has been to facilitate a transition to a more values-based tourism industry. The last two years, provided an opportunity to rethink the tourism economy we want to have in the region, by focusing on factors such as the kind of visitors we want to attract and the kind of experiences we want in the tourism industry, and respectively the kind of outcomes we want for locals and the landscape.
Important step in setting the region on this sustainable path is the new edition of Crossbill Guides for the Eastern Rhodopes.