The Bulgarian Duo Leading An Indoor Rock Climbing Revolution

As indoor rock climbing booms, two guys from Bulgaria have become the world leaders in putting up walls.

- Esm E. Deprez, photographs by Guy Martin

The Bulgarian village of Letnitsa (population 2,547) is a cluster of red-roof-tiled homes in a rural stretch of countryside in the Danube River valley, between the Balkan Mountains and the Romanian border. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive east from Sofia along a two-lane highway lined with monotone Soviet-era apartment buildings and sunflower fields. As the poorest and most corrupt member of the European Union, Bulgaria is still struggling to shed its communist past as it transitions to a market economy. A small town here is an unlikely place to manufacture walls for that most First World of sports: indoor rock climbing.

“I tend to consider myself as more clever than the others,” says Ivaylo Penchev, before leading a tour of his factory, on Letnitsa’s western edge. He and Metin Musov founded Walltopia in 1998 and have since turned it into the largest builder of climbing walls in the world. They’ve assembled more than 2.5 million square feet of them in more than 50 countries. That’s enough to cover all of the office space in the Empire State Building. They’ve surpassed older, more established companies riding the surge in interest in climbing by taking advantage of Bulgaria’s cheap labor and Penchev’s ego.

“All the time, I knew that we will succeed,” he says, circling a crew of 12 workers who are applying fiberglass to a 38-foot-long stretch of plywood ribbing. Resting on a support of rusty metal pipes, it will become a climbing structure bound for a gym in Wichita. “It was a matter of building a few climbing gyms, having people feel happy afterward, and then they would spread the word.”