Hotels in Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Every hotel we list in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, with live prices and free cancellation on most rooms.
Sleep in Kapana if you want to walk everywhere. The old craft quarter — a grid of short streets like Zlatarska, Abadzhiyska and Hristo Dyukmedzhiev — begins three minutes from Dzhumaya Square and holds most of the city's small guesthouses and apartment conversions at fair rates. The Old Town above it, spread over Nebet Tepe and Dzhambaz Tepe, has a handful of rooms inside nineteenth-century Revival mansions: quiet after nine, but the cobbles are brutal with wheeled luggage and you pay roughly a third more for the address. Along the pedestrian Knyaz Alexander I street and around Tsar Simeon's Garden sit the larger conventional hotels, with the shortest walk to the Roman Stadium and the Central Square. Karshiyaka, on the north bank of the Maritsa, is about 20 minutes on foot from Dzhumaya Square and consistently cheaper; the blocks behind Plovdiv Central Station and Yug bus station are cheaper again and perfectly workable for one night; and Trakia, the panel-block district 6 km east, is where the very lowest apartment rates live.
Almost everything a visitor comes for on the faith side is inside a 25-minute walk of Dzhumaya Square, which is the strongest argument for basing yourself in Kapana or the Old Town rather than out by the Fair. The Church of Saints Constantine and Helena stands beside the Ancient Theatre of Philippopolis, a few dozen steps from the Church of the Holy Mother of God and its clocktower; Sveta Marina, with its painted seventeen-metre wooden bell tower, sits at the eastern foot of the hills near Plovdiv University. Downhill, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Louis is a short detour off the main street, the Zion Synagogue hides in a courtyard off Tsar Kaloyan Street as one of the few working Sephardic synagogues left in the Balkans, and the Armenian church of Surp Kevork is minutes from the stadium. The Dzhumaya Mosque, raised under the Ottomans in the fifteenth century with its nine lead domes, is still in use on the square itself, while the Imaret Mosque of 1444 stands closer to the river on Han Kubrat Street. Stay in the Old Town and you can cover the lot in a single morning without transport.
Anyone here for the monasteries should think about the road south rather than the city grid. Bachkovo Monastery, founded in 1083 and second in size only to Rila, is 29 km from Plovdiv on the road towards Smolyan, with its separate eleventh-century ossuary a further short walk up the valley. Asenovgrad, 19 km out and known locally as the Bulgarian Jerusalem for its fifty-odd churches and chapels, sits on the way, with Asen's Fortress and the thirteenth-century Church of the Holy Mother of God Petrichka 3 km south of the town. Krastova Gora, the Rhodope pilgrimage site above Borovo, is around 70 km away and needs the best part of two hours each way on mountain road. Rakovski, 25 km north-east, is the largest Catholic town in the country and the place where Pope Francis celebrated Mass on 6 May 2019. Rooms in Asenovgrad run below Plovdiv prices and make sense if the monasteries, not the Old Town, are your reason for coming.
May, June and September are the months to aim for, when daytime temperatures sit in the low twenties and the Ancient Theatre is in use most evenings. Rates climb hardest during the autumn edition of the Plovdiv International Fair in late September, when business travellers fill the hotels on both banks of the Maritsa, and again around 6 September, the city holiday marking the Unification proclaimed here in 1885. Opera Open runs on the Ancient Theatre stage through late June and July, Hills of Rock takes over the Rowing Canal in July, and the Night of Museums and Galleries in mid-September fills the centre for a weekend. For the monasteries, the two dates that move beds are Bright Monday, when the miracle-working icon is carried in procession at Bachkovo, and 15 August for the Dormition; Krastova Gora draws its overnight crowds on 13 and 14 September, and most people sleep in Plovdiv or Asenovgrad rather than up the mountain. July and August regularly hit 35°C in the bowl of the city, and November to February is the cheapest stretch of the year by some distance.
