Podcast in English
Text size
Bulgarian National Radio © 2025 All Rights Reserved

NSI: 201 ghost villages in Bulgaria without a single inhabitant

Photo: .nsi.bg

Sofia is the largest municipality in Bulgaria by population, while Plovdiv has overtaken Varna to take second place. Burgas retains its position as the country's fourth largest city, while Stara Zagora now ranks fifth, displacing Ruse. 


These shifts in the ranking of the 20 largest municipalities by population have been recorded by the National Statistical Institute for the period from 2014 to 2023. In particular, Kardzhali has experienced remarkable growth, rising from 19th to 16th place.


As of 31 December 2023, there were 201 settlements without a single inhabitant, mainly concentrated in the central Balkan region, in the regions of Veliko Tarnovo (67), Gabrovo (67), Kyustendil (10) and Kardzhali (9). In addition, 1,453 villages, representing 27.6% of the settlements, have populations ranging from 1 to 49 persons. Notably, there are six cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, accounting for 35.2% of the total population.




Последвайте ни и в Google News Showcase, за да научите най-важното от деня!
Listen to the daily news from Bulgaria presented in "Bulgaria Today" podcast, available in Spotify.

More from category

Photo: The Bulgarian Embassy in the USA

Bulgarians around the world bow down to the Apostle of Freedom

152 years after the death of the Apostle of Freedom, the personality of Vasil Levski continues to excite Bulgarians, regardless of whether they are in the country or abroad. The Embassy of Bulgaria in Athens, Greece , has extended an invitation to the..

published on 2/19/25 11:23 AM
Milen Tsvetkov

The personalities who leave a mark on Bulgarian society and the film "Milen"

Easter 2020 went down in history with two things. The first was the state of emergency, introduced due to the Covid-19 pandemic that imposed a number of restrictions on us, the consequences of which we are still recovering from. The..

published on 2/18/25 9:41 PM

Todor Tokin: BNR's Foreign Broadcasts was not a channel of communist ideology, on the contrary!

At various times in its existence, the BNR's Directorate of Foreign Language Broadcasts, now known as Radio Bulgaria, the multimedia multilingual platform of Bulgarian National Radio, was more than just a workplace for a number of popular journalists...

published on 2/16/25 7:15 AM