Why green?- you will ask. The color of the gold is not green. And why we talk about Bulgarian gold after we don’t have gold diggings. The answer is simple. Because we have another gold, green colored, which is not material. It’s priceless!

     Every little piece of our nature, every drop of water from our rivers and our lakes, every unique plant, every rare animal – this is Bulgarian gold.

     There are some people who take it for granted. They think this way – when you cut a tree, another one will grow or when you kill an animal, another one will take its place. And maybe they are right for themselves. But one day when they'll start searching for a place which is not built up or a shadow under a tree while they are skiing, they will not find it. Then they will understand that they‘re wrong.

     The nature is very complicated system. Every negative change in some of its components reflects at the whole system. Imagine that you arrange a Domino’s pieces erected. Then you push the first one. It pushes the second one, then the third one… They all fall down just for few seconds. The clear felling of the forest is the beginning, it is the fall of the first Domino’s piece. Then everything change. There are no tree’s roots and the water from the rainfalls can’t be absorbed. So it carries away valuables organic and mineral substance. The consequence of this is soil erosion and floods.

     Here are some interesting facts. Almost 30% of the territory in Bulgaria is occupied by mountain areas. We have 29 000 different animals and 770 of them are vertebrates. The Bulgarian endemic plants numbered more than 250.

     Unique – this is the most appropriate word about Bulgarian nature. But we should start take care of it and protect it if we want to keep it this way.

Mihail Iliev