From: Pernik, Length 86 km | To: Kulata, | |
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Major cities Sofia, Blagoevgrad, Sandanski, Dupnitsa, Pernik, Petrich | ||
The Struma Motorway (Bulgarian: Автомагистрала „Струма“, Avtomagistrala "Struma") is a motorway currently under construction in Bulgaria. The motorway follows the route Pernik-Dupnitsa-Blagoevgrad-Sandanski-border to Greece. It is part of the Pan-European Corridor IV and also is part of Е79, that runs from Miskolc (Hungary) to Thessaloniki (Greece), via the Romanian cities of Deva and Craiova.
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Map of Avtomagisrala %E2%80%9EStruma%E2%80%9C, Bulgaria
The Struma motorway extends the Lyulin motorway (A6), running from Sofia to Pernik. The total planned length of Struma motorway is 156 km. It ends at the border crossing to Greece, at the village of Kulata. About 86.7 km of the motorway are already built and are in service, from Pernik junction to Blagoevgrad and from Sandanski to the village Kulata, nearby the border of Greece.
The motorway is named after the Struma River.
History
The motorway was divided into 5 construction lots: lot 0 is Pernik-Dolna Dikanya, lot 1 is Dolna Dikanya-Dupnitsa, lot 2 is Dupnitsa–Blagoevgrad, lot 3 is Blagoevgrad–Sandanski and lot 4 is Sandanski–Kulata. The construction of lot 1 started in September 2011 and was completed in July 2013, while the construction of lot 4 started in April 2012 and was finalized in July-August 2015. A contract for the construction of lot 2 was signed in February 2013, and it was completed in October 2015.
Due to the high construction value of the project the construction of lot 3 has been set back to the 2014–2020 financial period and only a conceptual design had been drafted before that. Further, lot 3 has been divided into 3 sub-lots — 3.1 (Blagoevgrad—Krupnik), 3.2 (Krupnik-Kresna or Kresna Gorge) and 3.3 (Kresna-Sandanski) and is being tendered and managed by NCSIP. A design and build contract for the Kresna—Sandanski section was signed on 25 September 2015.
When built, the motorway will provide two driving lanes in each direction and wide emergency lanes so that it meets European motorway standards. The motorway will pass the gorge in combination of viaducts and tunnels in order to be least environmentally destroying to the nature in the Kresna Gorge. The four sections of the motorway are supposed to cost 1.2 billion € because of the difficult construction in the gorge.