Provinces of Bulgaria

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 oblast (област) is preferably translated into English as "province", in order to avoid disambiguation and distinguish from the former unit called okrag ("окръг", translated as "district"), and the term region (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" according to the European Commission.