Explore Adjara: Batumi's Coast and the Mountains Behind It

Batumi runs along its seafront, and the seafront is the city's organising feature: a long landscaped boulevard between the beach and the town, busy with cyclists and families in the evening, with a pebble shore rather than sand. Behind it the old town keeps a quiet grid of low nineteenth-century buildings around a central square, and the contrast between those streets and the towers rising a block away is the city's defining visual joke — a rotating tower, a building with a Ferris wheel set into its side, and several others that would look extravagant anywhere. The botanical garden north of the city is the region's other set piece and among the finest in the wider region: a large hillside planting of subtropical species running down to the sea, laid out over more than a century, and worth a half-day rather than an hour. A cable car climbs from the centre to a ridge above the city for the long view over the bay.

South of Batumi the coast runs to the Turkish border, and the strip holds the quieter beach settlements that Georgians themselves use — smaller, cheaper and less built than the city. Gonio, near the border, is the site of a substantial Roman fortress whose walls and towers still stand in a rectangle by the sea, one of the oldest continuously fortified sites in the country and a genuinely atmospheric stop rather than a ruin to photograph from the road. Kobuleti to the north is the long-established Georgian family resort, and the wetlands nearby are a birdwatching site of real significance on the migration route. The whole coast has a short, intense summer season and empties dramatically outside it, which is worth knowing before booking a shoulder-season beach trip: the swimming ends well before the weather does.

Inland the region changes completely within an hour's drive. The road up the Adjaristsqali valley climbs into wet, steep, densely forested mountains, and the villages along it keep an older Adjaran character — wooden houses, tea terraces, and arched stone bridges from the medieval period still standing over the rivers, several of them genuinely elegant pieces of engineering. Makhuntseti waterfall and its bridge are the accessible introduction; further up, Khulo sits high in the valley and is connected onward by an old cable car strung across a gorge to a village on the far side, which is as memorable a short journey as Georgia offers. Higher still, the summer pastures open out above the tree line. This is also where Adjaran food is at its best — the region gives its name to the boat-shaped khachapuri that visitors meet everywhere else in the country, and its cooking is dairy-heavy and mountain-inflected in ways the coast's restaurants only partly show — the clearest single illustration of how Georgian cooking changes from one region to the next.