Balchik Botanic Garden

Bulgaria, Bulgaria

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The Balchik Botanic Garden, officially known as the University Botanic Garden of Balchik, is a protected botanical garden and monument of culture located in Balchik, a seaside town on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast about 31–50 kilometers north of Varna in northeastern Bulgaria. 

Created in 1955 by academician professor Daki Yordanov on the site of a park originally designed in 1926 by Swiss botanist Jules Jeannys as part of the summer residence of Romanian Queen Marie (1875–1938), the garden now spans 19.4 hectares and houses more than 4,900 plant species that continue to grow.

The complex is divided into three parts: a landscape park that is Queen Marie's cultural heritage ensemble, a garden adapted for people with limited abilities featuring seasonal flowers, Alpine spots, water areas, and cacti/succulents in stone beds cut from local Balchik rocks, and a protected area declared in 2005 as an idiosyncratic landscape where man and nature coexist harmoniously.

The garden is world-famous for its outdoor exhibition of large-sized cactus species arranged on 1,000 square meters, which is the second such collection in Europe after Monaco, and it also features exotic plants, spring and summer flowers, Alpine plants, water plants, ferns, rare and protected species, lianas, and flowering evergreen plants.