Protesters Decry Norman Foster's Bulgarian Eco-Resort

KARADERE BEACH, Bulgaria—Plans for the Black Sea Gardens, a luxury eco-friendly resort in Bulgaria being designed by British architect Norman Foster, are being met with cries of protest, the Guardian reports. The 540-acre project — which will house 15,000 people in five hill towns and will include artificial lakes, a marina, and a leisure area — has upset Bulgarian ecologists and local vacationers, despite being billed as the country's first carbon-neutral resort.

Foster's firm, Foster and Partners, has said on its Web site that the resort is designed to blend into the environment and be minimally intrusive. Visitors will be encouraged to leave their cars outside the settlement and travel by foot or via electric cars or shuttle buses. But local ecologists and vacationers fear that the resort will cause irreparable damage to the natural habitat of Karadere beach. Todor Karastoyanov, a Bulgarian musician who frequents the area, commented, "I ask myself whether Norman Foster really know what he's getting himself into... We want to try to stop him from making the biggest mistake of his career."

Georgi Stanishev, director of Projects Ltd., the resort's Bulgarian co-architects, has said that construction teams will be sensitive of their surroundings, and that the project is intended to be an antidote to the over-development along the rest of the Black Sea coast. But protesters say that the scale of the Black Sea Gardens alone makes the disturbance of wildlife inevitable. "We're not against mass tourism, but it should be planned in a proper war, with areas set aside for wildlife to breed," said Dimiter Georgiev, a local ornithologist. "The problem is so much of the coastal areas have been developed, there's now hardly any space left, which means the ecosystem's resilience is greatly weakened, so any new site does not have the moral right to call itself 'eco.'"