War refugees from Ukraine are to be moved from Bulgarian hotels on the Black Sea Coast to reception centers before the holiday season begins, the government in Sofia has said. The EU member state is currently home to some 90,000 refugees from Ukraine.
"Bulgaria can no longer afford to entertain Ukrainian citizens in hotels on the beach," deputy Prime Minister Kalina Konstantinova said in a video message on Monday (May 30).
The relocation will begin in the next few days, news agency dpa reported. The tourist season in the Black Sea usually begins in the first half of June. According to OECD data, the tourism sector contributed over 3% to Bulgaria's GDP in 2018.
According to dpa citing Bulgarian media reports, only 500 of the about 90,000 refugees so far have made use of the possibility to move from hotels to state-run holiday homes in the interior of the country.
The vast majority reportedly expressed little interest in being taken by train or bus to other areas. Many of the refugees had expressed concern about a potential lack of medical care or shopping facilities in the sometimes remote holiday resorts, dpa reported.
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Transit country for Ukrainian refugees
Since the beginning of the Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, almost 300,000 refugees from Ukraine have entered Bulgaria. But the European Union member state is mainly a transit country; most of them travel on to central Europe.
According to official figures from Monday, dpa reported, 90,365 refugees currently remain in Bulgaria. They are accommodated in hotels and privately with friends, relatives and volunteers.
Romania, Bulgaria's neighbor to the north, has taken in almost a million war refugees. Aside from Romania, the other EU countries that also share a border with Ukraine -- Poland, Slovakia and Hungary -- have welcomed a far greater number of war refugees.
In 2020, Bulgaria was the EU country with the lowest level of GDP per capita, followed by Greece and Croatia.
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Temporary housing of migrants in hotels
The practice of accommodating refugees and asylum seekers in hotels is a common practice to deal with a temporary influx until a more permanent housing solution is found.
For example, following a surge in migrants arriving on the Atlantic archipelago in the second half of 2020, thousands were accommodated in hotels and other tourism facilities on Gran Canaria and some of the other islands. The migrants were then gradually moved into a network of camps starting in December 2020.
Read more: Canary Islands: Migrants between a rock and a hard place
with dpa