Our first town
WalkNessebar
A self-guided walking tour of a town that has been Thracian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Bulgarian — often within the same street.
- Download on theApp Store
- Get it onGoogle Play
Coming soon to both stores. In the meantime, the tour has its own site at walknessebar.com
The walk
Fifteen stops across a peninsula you can cross in a quarter of an hour: churches, walls, a windmill, a harbour and the streets between them. You set off when you like and stop where you like — there is no group to keep up with and nothing to book.
The phone knows where you are. As you come within a few paces of a stop the narration begins on its own, so the story reaches you while you are looking at the thing it is about. Between stops the map is there if you want it, and silent if you don’t.
Inside the app
Beneath the walking route sit four deeper rooms. Twenty minutes gets you the walk. An afternoon gets you all of it.
Lost Shores of Mesambria
An interactive map of the ancient coastline, with the sites the sea has since taken back.
People of Old Nessebar
A living timeline of the eight civilisations that held this peninsula.
Read The Walls
The stonework as a written record: what the courses, the brick patterns and the marks were meant to say.
Icons of Mesambria
Thirteen icons, each with its own narration and its own history.
Before you go
Do I need a signal?
No. Download your language before you set off and the whole tour — narration, images and maps — sits on your phone. GPS itself needs no data connection, so the stops still find you when you reach them.
Does it use much battery?
It keeps location on while you walk, so more than reading a web page and rather less than turn-by-turn navigation with the screen lit. Most of the tour is spent listening with the phone in a pocket and the screen off.
How long is the walk?
Around two hours at an unhurried pace, including the time to stand and look at things. The peninsula itself takes fifteen minutes to cross, so nothing is ever far away — and the deeper modules can add as much again if you want them.
Can I do it in any order?
Yes. The stops are numbered as a suggested route, not a sequence you are locked into. Walk it backwards, skip a church, break for lunch and come back — the app picks up wherever you happen to be.
Is it accessible for limited mobility?
Partly, and we would rather say so plainly. Old Nessebar is cobbles, slopes and uneven stone, and several sites sit above or below street level. The harbour end and the main street are manageable; the upper lanes and some church interiors are not. If you tell us what you need before you travel, we can tell you which stops will work.
Is it suitable for children?
It suits curious older children well — the stories are short, they arrive by themselves, and there is a map to follow. The narration is written for adults, so younger children will do better with a grown-up filling in the gaps.