Background: When Sofia was announced as the new capital of Bulgaria on April 3 1879, the city had only one public park – the city park, called Gradskata – which had been constructed on the site of a former Turkish park on the initiative of governor PB Alabin and under the leadership of city architect Anton Kolar.

In the 1950s, Yuzhen Park was laid out in a paysage style, immitating English parks. It is divided into four sectors and mixes different terrain layouts and botanical species. Sixty-five species of birds, of which 29 are protected, make their home in the park.

If you are up to recuperating in a park no matter the season, Yuzhen Park (South Park) is a good choice. This park is preferred by many. Probably advantage number one is that you can enter it from five or six different entrances, therefore allocated in five or six different more or less central and good-quality living areas of Sofia.

That is – from Ivan Vazov or the end of Vitosha Boulevard, from Strelbishte (the “Shooting Range”), from Gotse Delchev, from Manastirski Livadi and from Hladilnika (the “Refrigerator”). By the way, translated Bulgarian districts of Sofia and Bulgaria in general posses ludicrous names, most of them a inheritance from communist times, such as Drouzhba (Friendship) 1, 2, 3 and Mladost (Youth) 1, 2, 3 and Nadezhda (Hope) 1, 2, 3, etc…

Coming back to Yuzhen Park, another advantage is that it is a medium-sized park, which means that it is wide enough to be pleasantly detached from the hustle and bustle of daily city life and traffic and small enough to be walked by foot.

This park has a number of ponds as well, two or three. Some presumably with fish, so there are a number of fishermen hanging on there.

If you are not into fishing, another option is to be a roller skater, a rollerblader, a cycler, a walker or a jogger. If not that either, because anyway it is winter, you might check out your creativity by making snowmen, when snow is available on one of the nice lawns.

Apart from that, these nice lawns are used for sunbathing, even in winter time.

There are also rickshaws available, bumper cars, bow and arrow targets and a children’s bungee-trampoline thing, nice especially during the warmer seasons.

Should you be more mediation oriented, there are a couple of mediation groups that gather in the mornings, such as Dounov’s followers and some kind of yoga practitioners.

But that is very early in the morning indeed, as the information goes.

If you do not fit into any of these groups and you are not up to much in the way of physical activity, your last resort is just hanging around or sitting leisurely at one of the open-air bistros, so colourfully called in Bulgarian city jargon “kapancheta”, which roughly means the “catchers” or the “catching places”, with a nice beer/chips/fish or ice cream and coffee, etc.

And last but not least, the usual groups of people inhibiting and circling the place consist of (as probably everywhere in the world) babies, children, mothers, fathers, retired people, occasional whackos, fishermen, yogies, lovers, teenagers drinking beer, playing cards, etc, sportsmen and concert-goers, rather metal-oriented fans, occasional after-work transit passers and fans of walking home and yes there is mounted police from time to time – to observe and control it all, which sounds quite sound.

In this sense, Yuzhen Park is a considerably safe park, compared with other areas and other cities within and out of Bulgaria. That means that you even might walk it at night and it will be at a considerably fearless state.

The other usual sight is the view of old gents and ladies selling the roasted sunflower seeds so obligatory for our culture and the more common peanuts at small makeshift tables.

And these small pastime delights go so nicely with the summer concerts and events usually set up on one of the lawns. There are usually people sitting all over the lawn, a bit more of a Western experience as it might be called, because until recently lawn-transgressors and sitters were looked on in Bulgaria as some kind of obscene transgressors and law breakers.

In general, Yuzhen Park is really a nice motley expanse of a place. For it is a microcosm within Sofia. So much in and so much out of it at the same time.