Beware of magic tiles

There’s water everywhere in Sofia and that impresses a lot of our guests. Today one of my Dutch guests exclaimed with admiration:

“You have so many beautiful fountains everywhere in Sofia! In Amsterdam we have plenty of water, but we don’t have so many fountains. Here it’s great!”

Тhis usually goes together with a compliment on how many nice parks (just one example here) we have and how clean our city is. This same guest was constantly comparing Sofia with Amsterdam (always ending in favour of Sofia), and the only time she noticed two plastic bottles in the grass, she assured me:

“Those must have been left from some tourists!”

We also have a lot of mineral water springs.

That is one of the reasons why the Romans settled in Serdica (former name of Sofia) thousands of years ago. And not only Serdica – whole Bulgaria is covered by mineral water springs. According to the Bulgarian popular science magazine “Osem”, most of them have been explored thoroughly and our researchers are aware of the medical purposes of all types of water – even if we haven’t by far reached the full potential of those springs.

Only in the area of Sofia there are 8 different types of mineral water.

In the central spring the local people bring their bottles to fill them up with hot mineral water, cool it down at home and drink it. This water is not high mineralized, which makes it very healthy for everyday drinking.

However, the water in Sofia is not always visible. Sometimes you can run into one of our numerous “magic tiles” – as one of our guests called them 🙂 If it’s dry, you would just stumble over it. But if it’s raining, you’ll definitely get your shoes wet. That’s what happened to one of my guests today, but she tried to look at the bright side. After all, you don’t need to visit an amusement park – just come to Sofia and you’ll get three in one – green parks with lovely fountains, healthy mineral water, and magic tiles – which would all make your experience unforgettable.