Romania’s biggest mall opens today in Băneasa, an area in the northern part of the capital, Bucharest, national media reported.

The Băneasa Shopping City will contain 221 stores, of which 70 per cent are open to customers today. The cafés and restaurants are expected to begin work after next weekend’s Easter holidays the Romanian newspaper Evenimentul Zilei reported.

Beside cosmetic and decorative objects, the mall will also have clothing brands that are entirely new to the Romanian market.

A relatively new phenomenon, no shopping malls existed in the Balkans until a few years ago. Just in the last couple of years, however, they have sprung up en masse and largely replaced the street-side stores and the department stores left from the communist era as preferred shopping places.

Just in Bucharest, there are already 11 malls, including the Băneasa Shopping City one, and 10 more are to open within the next two years. In Romania altogether, there will be more than 70 malls by 2010.

A property-development firm run by Irishman David Sharkey has formed a joint venture to develop a €591million shopping centre in Romania.

Warsaw-based Caelum Developments, which is headed by Sharkey, has formed the 50:50 joint venture with an international shopping centre company called Sonae Sierra.

They plan to develop Parklake Plaza - which will include a range of international shops, a supermarket and a 14-screen cinema - on a 20-acre site in Bucharest.

The Parklake Plaza site will also include two residential towers of about 300 apartments each. The five-level shopping centre is scheduled to open in April 2011, with almost 1.2 million square feet of floor space, making it one of the biggest shopping centres in Europe. It will have 443 shop units and 3,300 underground car parking spaces.

According to a statement from the firms, the ‘‘total gross investment, excluding Vat, is estimated at €591 million’’. Caelum Developments, which describes itself as ‘‘a specialist retail developer in Eastern Europe’’, was founded in 2002 by Sharkey’s Capital Partners Holding and focused initially on Poland.

It entered the Romanian market in 2006 and sourced the Parklake Plaza site in January last year. The firm has 46 properties in Poland, Romania, Hungary and Germany.

Sonae Sierra owns 47 shopping centres in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece, Romania and Brazil. It has almost 30 other projects under development.

The new working program about the construction of the second bridge connecting Bulgaria and Romania over the Danube River envisages its completion in 2010.

The news was announced Friday in the city of Vidin by Bulgaria’s Deputy Minister of Transport Vesela Gospodinova.

Gospodinova took part in a meeting on the bridge project, which is to connect Bulgarai’s Vidin and Romania’s Kalafat, together with representatives of the European Commission, the Secretary-General of the Romanian Ministry of Transport, MP Mihail Mikov, the District Governor Krustyo Spasov, and the Mayors of Vidin and Kalafat.

The construction works are planned to begin on April 15, as the necessary coastal facilities are to be constructed first.