Balchik Summer Palace
By mcdog | September 3, 2007
Early mornings are not really a speciality of Team Dogrose but when necessary we can do daybreaks with the best. This was one of those days. We planned to visit the botanical gardens in Balchik and we wanted to be there before it got too hot and also before the crowds arrived on tour buses. So we parked the car and grabbed an espresso from a machine in the corner of the car park. The coffee was good.
Then we walked down the steep hill to the palace gardens, past restaurants and stalls that were just opening for the day. It was very pleasant and still quite cool and we were so early that the gardens were not yet open, so we sat in the shade and waited. At 0815 the second of the ‘gate girls’ arrived and one sold us a ticket and the other tore a section from the ticket and we were through the gates and into the gardens.
We had bought a guide of the gardens which gave a recommended route for visitors so we followed that as well as we could. First on the route was ‘Allah’s Garden’, a mixture of cactus, fir trees and border plants, with a small stream running through the middle. This was a theme for the gardens, lots of running water, quirky buildings, bridges, stone walls, very large pots, and plants and trees gathered from around the world.
The palace was built by King Ferdinand of Romania in the 1920s for his wife as a place of solitude and it was still a tranquil place as we wandered about in the pleasant mixture of sunlight and shade. We even found a copy of the script from the ‘wedding’ we had seen the previous evening, the staff were still in the process of clearing up.
We never found the Tropical House, with it’s reptile display, but we did find a small garden just outside the entrance to the Palace that had a nice display of plants.
We then got breakfast at one of the restaurants on the lane leading to the car park and watched the first coach tours of the day streaming down the hill, happy to have missed the crowds.
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