Batumi

Batumi is Georgia's summer city and its strangest skyline: a Black Sea resort where a boulevard of palms and magnolias runs for kilometres beside a pebble beach, backed by an architectural free-for-all of glass towers, a building with a ferris wheel embedded in its side, and a replica of a Venetian palazzo. Behind it the Adjara mountains rise green and wet, and half an hour up the coast the Batumi Botanical Garden spreads over a headland with subtropical collections from around the world planted since 1912. The Ali and Nino sculpture on the seafront, two figures who pass through each other every evening, has become the city's emblem. Rain is a genuine feature here; Adjara is one of the wettest parts of the Caucasus.

History

Batumi stands on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Bathus in Colchis, from the Greek for "deep harbour"; under Hadrian it became a fortified Roman port, later abandoned for the fortress of Petra founded under Justinian I, and in 780 the region passed to the kingdom of Abkhazia, which led the unification of Georgia in the 11th century. From 1010 it was governed by a viceroy of the Georgian king, and after the kingdom broke up in the late 15th century it passed to the princes of Guria; in 1444 Burgundian knights under Geoffroy de Thoisy, raiding the coast, were ambushed while landing at Vaty, as Europeans then called it. The Ottomans took it, lost it to the Georgians in 1546 and again in 1609, and held it from 1703, when it grew into a provincial port; after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 the Treaty of San Stefano gave it to Russia, which occupied it on 28 August 1878 and made it a free port until 1886, the last Black Sea port Russia annexed in the Caucasus (Wikipedia, Batumi).

The landscape

• Batumi Botanical Garden - a subtropical hillside garden above the sea, north of the city.
• Ali and Nino - the moving sculpture of two figures on the seafront.
• The boulevard - kilometres of palm-lined promenade along the pebble beach.
• Argo cable car - up to a ridge with a view over the city and coast.

When to go

May to September for swimming, with July and August busiest and hottest. Spring and autumn are pleasant and much quieter. Rain can arrive in any month, and autumn storms are dramatic.

Practical notes

The beach is pebble, not sand, and the water shelves steeply, which surprises people expecting a resort beach. The architecture is genuinely chaotic and not to everyone's taste. Batumi has a casino industry that shapes parts of the nightlife. Rain is frequent enough that a beach-only trip is a gamble.

Nearby

Mtirala National Park and the Machakhela valley are inland; the Turkish border is 20 km south.