  When Bose-Eintein condensates are rotated sufficiently fast, a giant vortex
phase appears, that is the condensate becomes annular with no vortices in the
bulk but a macroscopic phase circulation around the central hole. In a former
paper [M. Correggi, N. Rougerie, J. Yngvason, {\it arXiv:1005.0686}] we have
studied this phenomenon by minimizing the two dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii
energy on the unit disc. In particular we computed an upper bound to the
critical speed for the transition to the giant vortex phase. In this paper we
confirm that this upper bound is optimal by proving that if the rotation speed
is taken slightly below the threshold there are vortices in the condensate. We
prove that they gather along a particular circle on which they are evenly
distributed. This is done by providing new upper and lower bounds to the GP
energy.
