Free Sofia Tour turned 5!

A little over a month ago Free Sofia Tour celebrated its fifth birthday! For the occasion we organized a party, tours in Bulgarian and tree planting. We worked hard, but we also had fun. This is what happened on our big day, August 13, and afterwards:

August 13, 2015 

To us the best gift are the smiles of our guests.

On August 13 we managed to show our capital to 179 people from all over the world. In the past five years and a month the Free Sofia Tour has walked around Sofia with over 95,000 tourists coming from over 140 countries. They have enjoyed almost 3,000 tours, which cumulatively have covered 3.5 times the distance of the Equator. 35 guides have participated in our team, selected among over 300 applicants. Currently the Free Sofia Tour relies on 24 young professionals.

We organized an awesome party, joined by about 90 of our friends, partners and supporters.

We enjoyed a lot of congratulations, shared emotions and, of course, wonderful presents! Thank you!

 August 13 – September 13, 2015 

Our special activity Get to know Sofia: Free Sofia Tour turns 5 took place over the course of the month. Our happy guides distributed over 700 flyers containing curious little known facts about Sofia.

We organized a total of 7 free tours in Bulgarian in the five Sundays between August 13 and September 13. They were enjoyed by 191 Bulgarians. We would like to express our gratitude to the guides who led these tours: Vasil, Ivan, Dino, Anna, Martin, Slavyan и Denitsa.

This is what one of our guests thought of the experience:

Reni Georgieva: “I was impressed and enchanted by the young, intelligent (I heard her speaking not only excellent English, but also Italian and other languages) and energetic guide. She presented the information in very fun ways, we even played a little historical play, explaining the history of the Third Bulgarian Kingdom and our kings of the period. It’s great you also do these tours in Bulgarian as well. After all, we’re Bulgarian, right? Thank you, Anna, I hope there are more people like you!!! Good luck!!!!!”

September 13, 2015

The end of our month of celebration was marked by an extraordinarily exciting event: the planting of trees. On September 13 at 11 a.m. our five trees, symbolizing the years past, arrived in front of the Palace of Justice, the starting point of our tour. Every tree was planted by our guides and corresponds to one of the core values of the 365 Association 365 and the Free Sofia Tour project.

The first tree was planted by Martin, Denitsa and Radina and symbolizes our first value: Quality.

The second tree was planted by Nikolay P., Nikolay B. and Vanya and represents the value of Responsibility.

The third tree, symbolizing Trust, was planted by Alexander, Alex and Nikola.

Tree number four, dubbed Progress was planted by Slavyan, Kristina and Stefan.

The fifth and last tree was planted by our youngest guests, the children that joined our tour this day. It bears our fifth main value, Satisfaction.

Our trees are young and fragile like our little guests, but they are planted with a lot of effort and love. We hope they will grow along with us and our goals, ideas and dreams. We thank everyone for their support and participation during our month of celebration!