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Provinces of Bulgaria

First-level administrative subdivisions of Bulgaria

Field	Value
name	Provinces of Bulgaria
bg
map	Regions of Bulgaria Map.png
category	Unitary state
territory	BUL Republic of Bulgaria
upper_unit	Regions
current_number	28
population_range	101,018 (Vidin) – 1,291,591 (Sofia City)
area_range	1,348.90 sqkm (Sofia City)– 7,748.07 sqkm (Burgas)
government	Province government, National government
subdivision	Municipality

The provinces of Bulgaria () are the first-level administrative subdivisions of the country.

Since 1999, Bulgaria has been divided into 28 provinces ( – oblasti; singular: област – oblast; also translated as "regions") which correspond approximately to the 28 districts (in – okrǎg, plural: окръзи – okrǎzi), that existed before 1987.

The provinces are further subdivided into 265 municipalities (singular: община – obshtina, plural: общини – obshtini).

Sofia – the capital city of Bulgaria and the largest settlement in the country – is the administrative centre of both Sofia Province and Sofia City Province (Sofia-grad). The capital is included (together with three other cities plus 34 villages) in Sofia Capital Municipality (over 90% of whose population lives in Sofia), which is the sole municipality comprising Sofia City province.

Terminology

The provinces do not have official names – legally (in the President's decree on their constitution), they are not named but only described as "oblast with administrative centre [Noun]" – together with a list of the constituting municipalities. In Bulgaria they are usually called "[Adjective] Oblast"; occasionally they are referred to as "Oblast [Noun]" and rarely as "oblast with administrative centre [Noun]".

The Bulgarian term "област" (oblast) is preferably translated into English as "province", in order to avoid disambiguation and distinguish from the former unit called "окръг" (okrag, translated as "district") and the term "регион" (always translated as "region"). At any rate, "district" and "region" are sometimes still used to name these contemporary 28 units.

"region": "28 regions (en) / région (fr) / oblast (bg)" – in ISO 3166-2 Newsletter II-3 (2011-12-13, corrected 2011-12-15)
"district": "The territory of the South Central Region encompasses five districts – Pazardzhik, Plovdiv, Smolyan, Haskovo, and Kyrdzhali." – in a website of the European Commission.

Provinces

! colspan="3" style="background-color:#CDCDCD" align="center"| Provinces of Bulgaria

- valign="top"

Province	Population (Census 2011)	Population (Census 2021)	Change (2011/2021)	Land area (km2)	Population density (/km2)	Municipalities	Planning
Region	7,364,570	6,519,789	-11.5%	111,001.71	58.73	265
Blagoevgrad	323,552 292,227 -9.7% 6,449.47	45.31 14	South Western	Burgas	415,817 380,286 -8.5% 7,748.07	49.08 13	South Eastern	Dobrich	189,677 150,146 -20.8% 4,719.71	31.81 8	North Eastern	Gabrovo	122,702 98,387 -19.8% 2,023.01

History

Provinces (with ex-districts) in 1987–1999

In 1987, the then-existing 28 districts (okrags) were transformed into 9 large units (in Bulgarian called oblasts – provinces), which survived until 1999.

The 9 large provinces are listed below, along with the pre-1987 districts (post-1999 small provinces) comprising them.

1987–1998
oblasts	Comprising former districts (future provinces)
Burgas	Burgas, Sliven, Yambol

On 1 January 1999, the old districts were restored with some modifications, but the designation "oblast" ("province") was kept.

References

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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