It is located in the valley of the Struma River at the foot of the Rila Mountains, 101 kilometres (63 miles) south of Sofia, close to the border with North Macedonia.

Blagoevgrad features a pedestrian downtown, with preserved 19th-century architecture and numerous restaurants, cafés, coffee shops, and boutiques.

[3] The town was renamed Blagoevgrad in 1950, after the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party founder Dimitar Blagoev, who was an immigrant from Ottoman Macedonia.

During the Crisis of the Third Century, the Scaptoparans wrote a petition to the emperor Gordian III, whose Latin and Koine Greek text is preserved in an inscription discovered there in 1868, and dated 238 AD.

In the middle of the 17th century, the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi passed by here and wrote that the town of Orta Jumaa had 200 tiled houses, a large mosque with many worshippers and 80 souks and many mineral springs.

In the 1830s, the French geologist Ami Boué passed by here and described Dzhumaya as a town of 3,000 to 4,000 inhabitants, where a hereditary voivode lived.

[11] In 1900, according to Vasil Kanchov the population of the town numbered 6440 people, of whom 1250 were Bulgarians, 4500 Turks, 250 Vlachs, 200 Roma, 180 Jews and 60 Greeks.

The Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 saw the annexation of the area Ottoman rule and its integration in the Bulgarian state in the Treaty of Constantinople.

[13] In March 1943, during World War II, the Bulgarian Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (KEV) established at Gorna Dzhumaya (modern Blagoevgrad) a transit camp for Jews deported from Bulgaria during the Holocaust.

The camp consisted of a tobacco warehouse and some school buildings, under the command of KEV official Ivan Tepavski, where inmates were imprisoned and malnourished for 11–12 days before being taken to Lom, embarked for Vienna, and finally exterminated at Treblinka.

The town is protected from cold northerly winds due to the natural barrier of the Rila and Pirin mountains.

Mountain breeze descends from Rila along the river Blagoevgradska Bistritsa bringing cool air during hot summer days.

The town is a main crossroad for tourists who want to visit the mountains and their ski resorts such as Bansko, Dobrinishte, Sandanski.

The private radio networks Focus Pirin and Darik Blagoevgrad also have their own local programmes.

Today, Blagoevgrad is one of the few places in Bulgaria where members of the small Aromanian minority of the country still live.

The local team's name is the "Buffaloes" and its manager is Yassen Nedelchev, who also serves as the Bulgarian Baseball Federation's president.

The town has two multi-purpose sports halls, the second was opened in 2007, it has a capacity of over 1000 seats and meets all requirements of the International Federation of handball, basketball and volleyball, a game area may be used for competitions Rhythmic gymnastics and martial arts.

The new facility of AUBG, the ABF center serves as occasional facilitator of the national volleyball training and competitions.

Women's football is represented by the football club Sportika - a participant in the National Championship for Women Francofolies Blagoevgrad is the host of the most important francophone music festival "Francofolies", which takes place annually in only few other locations: La Rochelle, France; Montreal, Canada, Spa, Belgium.

[26] The festival has attracted some big names, including French pop singers Patrick Bruel, Patricia Kaas, Zaz, rapper Fefe, and the groups Nouvelle Vague and Gypsy Kings.

Former participants of Bansko Jazz Fest include Jamie Davis, Joss Stone, and Vasil Petrov.