September 2026

A spa town built for a hundred thousand Soviet workers a year now has a park of colonnaded palaces going quietly to ruin, radon springs still flowing, and Stalin’s private bath. It is the strangest, most photographed afternoon in western Georgia.

Twenty minutes from Kutaisi, a kilometre and a half of lit walkway winds through halls of stalactites, past an underground river, in a cave named for a titan who was chained — according to Georgians — on a mountain a hundred kilometres away.

Since 1902 a narrow-gauge train has climbed from Borjomi to Bakuriani through the forest, over a bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel’s firm, at the speed of a brisk walk. Nobody takes it to get anywhere.

The most famous bottle in the former Soviet Union comes from a wooded gorge two and a half hours from Tbilisi, where the water still rises warm from a spring in a park. It tastes of salt and volcano. There is a reason.

On a hill above Akhaltsikhe, a walled town restored in 2012 contains four centuries of everyone who ruled southern Georgia — and, within a few hundred metres, the places where each of them prayed.

In the 1180s Georgia’s only reigning queen ordered a monastery-fortress cut into a mountainside above the Kura — thirteen storeys, six hundred rooms, a church, a bell tower and its own water supply. Most of it is still there, and you can walk through it.

Ninety minutes from Tbilisi, on a striped ridge where Georgia ends and Azerbaijan begins, a 6th-century monk dug a cell into the rock. Fifteen centuries later the monastery is still there, and so are the monks.

Every day of the year, on a bridge with no river under it, Tbilisi lays out its attic on blankets — medals, enamel, daggers, Zenit cameras, cloisonné, the odd icon. It is the best hour of browsing in the Caucasus.

The walls above Tbilisi’s old town have been rebuilt by every power that held the city for 1,500 years — which is nearly all of them. The cable car takes three minutes; the story takes a little longer.

The city was founded on hot springs and named after them. Fifteen centuries later the brick domes of Abanotubani still steam. Here is what happens inside, and how to do it properly.

A small 6th-century church on a bluff above the meeting of two rivers is the most reproduced image of Georgia. Lermontov set a poem here. The reason it was built is older than the view.