"The Belt and Road plan for a smart city in Bulgaria is falling apart.

On a gray winter morning Ravno Polje, the few residents of mostly elderly age wander fruitlessly through the neglected village square, some buying groceries at a small store, others sitting on plastic chairs at the only café and enjoying a portion of chicken and rice for $2.

The houses around the square are crumbling, the roads are riddled with potholes, and the only sign of profitable activity is the rumble of trucks passing through an industrial area and a supermarket warehouse. There is an air of somnolence and quiet decadence about the village, it seems stuck in a communist past that has changed little since 1990, when a wave of protests in the capital Sofia ended a four''Bulgaria's decades behind the Iron Curtain.

This is a scene that can be found in thousands of villages across Bulgaria or in other former Eastern Bloc countries still struggling to catch up with their wealthy Western neighbors. And it's especially cruel for Ravno Polya because it should have been completely different. This neglected village was already supposed to be Europe's first smart city, thanks to an amazing billion-dollar transformational project promised to residents under the auspices of China's Belt and Road Initiative.

Megaproject St Sofia

Almost a decade ago, investors from Hong Kong bought a golf club on the outskirts of Ravno Polje for a reported €11 million and drew up plans to turn the surrounding sunflower fields into a''St Sofia entertainment and residential complex, which the local media at the time enthusiastically dubbed "Bulgarian Las Vegas". The huge St Sofia project in Ravno Polje, which the media called 'Bulgaria's Las Vegas', never materialized, leaving the former Eastern Bloc country neglected and oppressed.

An old industrial building stands in an area that has been set aside for a billion-dollar Smart City project in Ravno Polje, Bulgaria. Covering 1 million square meters (247 acres), of which 4,000 are dedicated to the Bulgarian rose garden - St Sofia was to include Europe's largest world-class hotel, office buildings, a multi-purpose indoor coliseum, a casino, a 31,000-seat exhibition center, an artificial lake and a children's entertainment center,''based on Sega's Joypolis theme park in Tokyo, Japan. The luxury shopping center, designed in the design of the Dubai Mall, as well as Europe's largest indoor water park and nightlife district, was meant to please visitors and owners of luxury homes and apartments.

Managed by Hong Kong-based Bulgaria Development Holdings Limited, this project of unlimited ambition promised to create 10,000 jobs during the construction phase and several thousand more after completion, while a promo using computer-generated imagery described it as "a milestone in China's penetration of Europe under the Belt and Road Initiative".

The St Sofia project failed to live up to expectations.

In admiring publications in March 2019, China's Party''China Daily, a newspaper owned by the Communist Party of China, quoted Josie Lok Pui-sze, executive director of Bulgaria Development Holdings, as saying that St Sofia can contribute not only to the local economy but also to the Bulgarian economy as a whole and will create "a 1 percent GDP growth and add at least 5,000 new jobs". Back in 2018, Lok announced the first phase of work would begin by the end of the year and be completed by 2021.

But if all that exaggeration seemed too good to be true for the residents of Ravno Field, it turned out to be true. Immediately after the launch ceremony, everything went quiet, the project collapsed, and Lok and her colleagues at Bulgaria Development Holdings pulled out of their office in a trendy shopping center on the outskirts of Sofia - rent they,''Apparently not paid for the year. Without a word of apology or explanation to those who were preparing to watch the city of the future appear on their doorstep, and without a line of coverage from the Chinese and Bulgarian media that had so enthusiastically touted the lavish plans, the golf club was sold to a group of Bulgarian businessmen in 2019, and life in Ravno Polje returned to its dull routine.

What went wrong? How could a megaproject that seemed to be supported by big Chinese investors, accepted by the Bulgarian government and promoted as part of China's flagship Belt and Road Investment Initiative fall apart and disappear without a trace?

"We bought [the golf club] from them in September 2019, before Covid," he says. "They bought the golf club, and that's it.

With regard to the promos and their extravagant statements, Angels laughs: "What they were showing people was completely different to the reality. On paper, everything was fine. Everything else was a disaster." Bulgaria Development Holdings "is not officially bankrupt, but they owe money," he says, confirming that "their offices are closed because they didn't pay rent. "

Under Angelov's leadership, the 250 members of the golf club are mostly townspeople who, in an hour-and-a-half''road from Sofia - can look forward to a modest expansion of the club. Angelov gestures to a construction site next to the existing clubhouse, where "we're building 70 rooms and apartments, a 3,000-square-meter spa with mineral water and a conference center. That's it [...] and we're building a couple of houses next to the 18th green. "

When he gets into his car, clearly enjoying the pleasure of his predecessor's downfall, he adds with a smirk, "This is not going to be Bulgaria's Las Vegas. "