By Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze, MD, MPH, PhD · 15/09/2026
Martvili is the canyon everyone photographs, and for once the photographs are accurate: a gorge forty metres deep and in places only a few metres wide, its walls draped in moss and ferns, its water the improbable turquoise of glacier melt filtered through limestone, and light that filters down through the trees overhead so that everything — rock, water, air — is green. It looks like a set. It is a river.
The Dadiani
Samegrelo, the lowland region west of Kutaisi, was ruled for six centuries by the Dadiani family, princes with a palace at Zugdidi and a taste for the European. In the 19th century they made the canyon their bathing place: a stone stairway leads down to a pool at the head of the gorge where the family swam, and the spot is still called the Dadiani bath. The last Dadiani married a niece of Napoleon III; their palace at Zugdidi, an hour away, keeps one of Napoleon’s death masks and a good deal of French furniture.
The walk and the boat
The site is organised in two parts. A walkway with bridges and viewing platforms follows the upper canyon for about 700 metres — the section with the waterfalls, where the river drops in steps through the rock and the spray keeps the moss alive. Below it, in the calmer lower section, is the boat: an inflatable raft with a boatman, fifteen minutes up the gorge between the walls and back, in water so clear you see the stones on the bottom and the trout above them. The boat is the reason to come. The queue for it in July can be long; mornings and weekdays are better.
The river
The Abasha rises in the hills of Lechkhumi and is, for most of its length, an ordinary green river. The canyon is a two-kilometre accident: a band of hard limestone that the water cut down through rather than around, over a few hundred thousand years. Upstream, the river is warm enough to swim in summer; downstream it joins the Tekhuri and flows to the Black Sea. The whole limestone belt of western Georgia — Prometheus cave, Sataplia, the Okatse canyon with its cliff walkway — is the same rock, carved by different rivers.
Practical
Martvili is 45 minutes from Kutaisi. The walkway takes half an hour; the boat, with the wait, an hour. Wear shoes that grip — the platforms are wet — and bring something waterproof for phones on the boat. There is a café and a small museum at the entrance. The Okatse canyon, 40 minutes away, is the aerial counterpart: a walkway bolted to the cliff 100 metres above the river, ending in a platform over nothing. The two together, with Prometheus on the way, are the classic Imereti day.
See it with GTour
Martvili is the centre of the canyons & Prometheus cave day from Kutaisi, the third day of the Kutaisi & Western Georgia tour, and the last stop before the sea on Georgia in 10 days.
ქართულად: მარტვილის კანიონი — ნავით მწვანე ტაძარში
