If you've ever considered a holiday on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, you'll have been bombarded with cruddy package options. Almost the entire coast has been a developmental gold rush since the 60s, primed for bums-on-seats package deals. Miles after mile of beach umbrellas, rectangular apartments, and high-rise resorts superimposed on dunes and parkland; a budget Benidorm.

And yet here I am on a totally wild beach, not a hotel in sight, naked, doing my best to personify brazen abandon. I race into the sea, Baywatch style, bits flapping. My girlfriend is horrified.

The beach is called Irakli, and is home to nudists, tortoises and off-shore dolphins, and an emblem of Bulgaria's nascent protest movement against the country's preoccupation with flogging the Black Sea coast to developers as quickly as possible. In 2005 a campaign was started by a handful of "beach people"- young families and Sofia artists and hippies who spend their summers camping here - to save Irakli from the construction that has claimed 90% of the coast. Since then, the movement has widened its scope to try to save dozens more of Bulgaria's wild beaches. In its death throes, the coast is fighting back.

Finding the wild beaches of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast isn't easy. My hunt starts in a cafe in Sofia, where Andrey Kovatchev, an ecologist who has dedicated himself to saving the beaches, draws directions in my notebook. With each annotation, he rues the hovering threats: "The Bulgarian Prime Minister's brother is trying to develop this one ... " "Raiffeisen Bank technically owns this bit ... " "The Mayor of Moscow's wife has allegedly purchased this bit ... "

It's a rather depressing, ominous tale. But for now, in between large stretches of identikit resorts there are dozens of some of the wildest beaches in Europe, and I want to sunbathe on them before it's too late.

At Varna, at the northern end of the coast, my girlfriend and I rent a Hyundai that thinks it's a Lada, and start to chug our way down the coast. It gives us plenty of time to shudder at the passing holiday cities that have proliferated over the last decade as the Black Sea's development has accelerated, executed with the utmost carelessness. There are hilarious investment signs everywhere - they seem to have taken a random selection of English words deemed to be seductive, and scattered them across an array of hoardings. Beach Love Beauty Place! Dream Invest Sandy Houses! They could be Google search terms of everything the Bulgarian Black Sea coast wants to be. The two most popular black sea resorts towns- Golden Sands and Sunny Beach - have even sacrificed their Cyrillic names.

And then we find Irakli, one of the beaches that got away. The road that turns off from the main coastal motorway begins to crumble into the surrounding wilds as it meanders towards the sea, ending in a ramshackle car park under the trees. There are a few telltale signs that this is far from the package crowd scene - some dreadlocks, a few dogs, a wanton flash of male bum through a flapping pashmina (an off-duty nudist, I later discover).

There are lots of people at the beach, and a few lines of pitched umbrellas. Part of me was expecting - probably hoping in fact - for naked hippies doing cartwheels and singing. Maybe some flags and stuff.

Although it isn't the hippy heaven I was imagining, behind the sand, instead of lines of apartments and cafes and adverts, there is shrub and oak forest rolling up towards a peak. It really is very beautiful.

And as the day progresses, we begin to get the feeling that Irakli leads something of a double-life. The families begin to disperse, and, every now and then, people laden with backpacks wander along the sand towards a rocky headland a few kilometres down the beach.

We've brought bread, cheese spread, cucumbers and tomatoes and plastic forks and spoons and lots of water, but we end up at a wooden shack restaurant on the sand, the only development at Irakli. We eat freshly-caught whitebait and drink homemade white wine that tastes of elderflower and comes with slices of lemon, accompanied by old Bulgarian love songs from the stereo. As the sun disappears, at the far end of the beach- where the backpacks were headed - we can see fires lighting up. Something is going on up there.

We grab our sleeping bags and begin the long march. After 15 minutes we hit the first tents, scattered sparsely across the sand. These are the "beach people" we've been looking for, many of whom spend the entire summer here. We scout for the best fire, and then find an unoccupied gazebo nearby where we roll out towels and then our sleeping bags over them. We can hear people playing drums, but we're happy to gaze at the fire from a distance. We find ourselves talking about how far away the stars are and how big the universe is. This is the first time either of us has slept on a beach so I reckon we're entitled to a bit of soppiness.

In the morning we are woken by the sun rising over the sea as it casts a pinky-orange hue on everything. As it hits the front lip of our gazebo, we are spared from the heat, and fall back to sleep. When we wake again, a young girl is sitting next to us. This is confusing, until we see mum and dad wandering towards us with day-gear and folding seats. They want their gazebo back, but are very polite about it.

The scene in the mid-morning is as far away from the resorts as you could imagine. About 30 mini-camps are waking up, many of them with kids running around on the sand. This is the beginning of an average summer day for the beach people. Everything else seems a long way away. People are plodding down to the water for a wake-up swim, then lolling under makeshift shelters made from branches and sarongs.

There are groups of nudists, their nudism, perhaps, a sort of protest in itself; the antithesis of cranes and concrete and money. I can't help feeling a sadness. The whole coast must once have been this pristine, before the gold rush started. So I get naked. Swimming in the sea with nothing on is one of the best things I have ever done.

We head off for a day-trip to our second Bulgarian blip. South of Burgas we enter the Ropotamo Nature Reserve, where for a few kilometres the road is blissfully devoid of billboards telling us that all our dreams will come true if we buy an apartment in a seaside complex shaped like a giant W.

Following Andrey's instructions, we park up at a small roadside stop just before the road bends inland and arches upward after crossing the Ropotamo River. For 10 minutes we wander across empty, grassy sand dunes wondering if we've got the right place. As we reach the end of the dunes we can hear the sea, and as we peak over the final lip of sand we can see three bare bottoms.

At Ropotamo I realise another thing about nudists: where there are nudists there are not very many non-nudists. The beach stretches for a few kilometres to the north where there are large clusters of visitors, but here at the southern, nudist end, there is hardly anyone at all, even in the middle of August.

Andrey had identified about 12 of the wild beaches on our map, with plenty more that he couldn't fit in. Other than Irakli and Ropatomo, we also make it to the Kamchia Sands near the delta of the Kamchia river, where we can't see the beginning or end of the beach, and where we eat tomatoes and watermelon purchased from little old ladies whose stalls line the road from the motorway to the sea. But we're saving the best beach for last, where we plan to attend a wedding.

I first heard of Karadere when a friend in Sofia, another self-described "beach person", emailed me about its imminent demise. Plans had been drawn up, by none other than Sir Norman Foster, to build a series of "eco-villages" on the site of one of Bulgaria's most loved wild beaches. An article in the Guardian last July brought the issue to global attention, and the project has been delayed, and hopefully cancelled. The same friend invited me to come and see the beach myself, when a friend of hers was getting married on the sand.

In this case, the instructions were to go into the nearby village of Byala, and ask somebody who looks the type. We are directed by a man with lots of tattoos and very short shorts down a dirt road though vineyards and parched fields that fractures into a handful of different clearings, used as parking spots, dotted along the coast. There are scores of camps and isolated tents on the sand stretching into the distance, with more mini settlements hidden in the trees behind the beach. We lay our sleeping bags on the sand, making our beds in advance. As the sun sets and the moon appears the fires are lit, and the Black Sea coast twinkles for miles into the distance.

The wedding is the biggest thing that has ever happened on Karadere. The locals are keen to stress that this is not a party beach, it is just a beach that happens to be having a party. A famous Bulgarian gypsy band starts the festivities, before a DJ takes over and everyone gets happy and drunk under an improvised marquee pegged by demolition wood.

We meet the local shaman, who lives here for most of the year. He is an excellent dancer. I ask people how long they think the beach will last, and they say as long as they are here. There is talk of a permanent camp on the beach. It's reassuring to know that if the developers do move in, there will be a small army of people waiting to resist them. Good luck to them. Rumours of the death of Bulgaria's wild beaches, hopefully, have been greatly exaggerated.

Way to go

Getting there

Wizzair (0904 475 9500, wizzair.com) flies to Varna from Luton from £105.98 return. Car rental with Europcar (0871 384 1089, europcar.co.uk) from £24.13 per day from Varna airport .

For information on getting to Bulgaria by train, see Seat61.com's Bulgaria page.

Where to stay

Camping on all of Bulgaria's wild beaches is free, but take food and water. For alternative accommodation options, the closest town to Karadere is Byala, and the closest town to Irakli is Obzor. See bgstay.com for hotels, apartments, villas and more.