Nevyastata Viewing Platform, Smolyan Live Cam

From the Nevyastata viewpoint above Smolyan, this camera looks out over the wooded ridges of the central Rhodopes. Hamlets sit scattered on their shoulders.

The rock buttress on the left of the frame is the outcrop the viewpoint is named for — Nevyastata, "the Bride", one of the rock figures the Rhodopes are full of. Below and ahead lie spruce and beech forest, a few meadows still cut by hand, and the red roofs of a hamlet on a saddle. In the distance the ridges fold away one behind another, pale with haze on warm afternoons.

The Ezerovo quarter of Smolyan sits just below the lens at around 1,000 metres. Mist forms in the valley on most autumn mornings and burns off by mid-morning; the first snow usually arrives in November.