This town has come up a few times in my searches now, and it looks interesting because ...

Location - NW (for some reason, NW Bulgaria has always attracted me), about equal distance to Vratsa, Pleven and Danube river (looks about 50km, which would make a nice day trip for me on my road bike). near mountains for mountain biking (or looks like it?), trains to Sofia.

Facilities - most estimates put the population around 20,000, which is very similar to the town I live in right now. (I haven't had to leave the town I live in now for shopping or entertainment in over a year.) One site I've looked at says "
has a large hospital, shops, restaurants, postoffice, schools, swimming pools, bus station, railway station on the main line"
so I'm assuming it has everything you need for day to day life. (This is quite important to me because we don't own a car, and don't intend to buy one. We do get about by bike, though!)

Can anyone add to this, correct any of my assumptions, or tell me what it's like to live there?

lulubel wrote:

Facilities - most estimates put the population around 20,000, which is very similar to the town I live in right now.

Those estimates sound quite a bit out of date. The population is actually around 14,000 nowadays.

The reason it's called 'red shore' or 'red beach'' is a bit confusing as it's nowhere near the coast! The name is actually due to the red clay in the river.

The town does have it's own web site:
[url:12i4lz4t]http:
//chervenbryag.
bg/bg/[/url:12i4lz4t]

It's in Bulgarian only, but Google does a fairly reasonable job of translating it!

I have friends that have live there for 3 years now and they find the people great. They live on the outskirts of Cherven Bryag, a very modern town. The villages around are like going back in time but all have running water, electric, telephones and internet. Pleven is just up the road, 40 mins by train or bus and Sofia is 2 hours by train.

Thank you both. I've had a look at the Cherven Bryag site (interesting because google translate kept telling me it was Russian!) Yes, I think you're probably right, Chris, and the estimates are out of date. The figures for where I live now are probably out of date too because I think they are from 2009, and I know there's been a mass expat exodus since then.

Carmen, that's really interesting. I'm not sure whether I'd be looking in town (although I have found one agent with what looks like reasonably priced land on the outskirts) or in the villages. It really depends on how good the internet access is.