Commonly referred to as the marine (or summer) capital of Bulgaria, Varna is a major tourist destination, business and university centre.City landmarks include the Varna Archaeological Museum, exhibiting
the Gold of Varna,the Roman Baths,the Battle of Varna Park Museum, the Naval Museum in the Italianate Villa Assareto displaying the museum ship Drazki torpedo boat, the Museum of Ethnography
in an Ottoman-period compound featuring the life of local urban dwellers, fisherfolk, and peasants
in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The Sea Garden is the oldest and perhaps largest park in town containing an open-air theatre, a dolphinarium, the Nicolaus Copernicus Observatory and Planetarium, the Museum of Natural History,
a terrarium, a zoo, an alpineum, a children's amusement park with a pond, boat house and ice-skating rink, and other attractions. The National Revival Alley is decorated with bronze monuments to prominent Bulgarians, and the Cosmonauts' Alley contains trees planted by Yuri Gagarin and other Soviet
and Bulgarian cosmonauts. The Garden is a national monument of landscape architecture and is said to be the largest landscaped park in the Balkans.Varna has some of the finest and oldest museums,
professional arts companies, and arts festivals in the nation and is known for its century-old traditions in visual arts, music, and book publishing, as well as for its bustling current pop-culture scene.