Romania and Bulgaria officially enter this vast free movement zone on Sunday. With this partial double entry, the Schengen area will now include 29 members.
More than 400 million people can travel freely, without internal border controls. Croatia, although it entered the EU after Romania (19 million inhabitants) and Bulgaria (6.5 million), members since 2007, beat them to the punch in January 2023. In any case, both Sofia and Bucharest have warned: there will be no going back.