Explore Svaneti and Samegrelo: Towers, Glaciers and Gorges

Mestia is Upper Svaneti's main town and the base for everything above it: a compact settlement at altitude where stone defensive towers stand between ordinary houses, guesthouses and a surprisingly good museum. The towers are the region's signature — tall, tapering, windowless for most of their height, built so a family could withdraw upward and hold out, and raised in numbers because this was a place beyond the reach of any protecting authority. Many remain in the yards of occupied homes rather than fenced off, which is the detail that makes the place feel inhabited rather than curated. The Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography holds illuminated manuscripts, icons and metalwork that stayed in these valleys precisely because invaders could not get up here, and an hour in it before heading further improves everything that follows. Above the town, the walk to the Chalaadi Glacier and the climb to the Koruldi Lakes are the two standard days, both excellent and neither technical.

Ushguli is a cluster of villages further up the valley from Mestia, often described as among the highest permanently inhabited settlements in Europe, sitting beneath Mount Shkhara at the head of the valley with towers rising out of the meadows and the glacier visible at the end of it. It is the image that sells Svaneti and it deserves the reputation. What it is not is a short excursion from Mestia: the road is rough, the journey takes hours each way by shared four-wheel drive arranged locally, and doing it as a same-day return means spending most of the daylight in a vehicle to stand in the village for an hour. Staying a night changes it completely — the light at either end of the day is the point, and the walk between the villages is why you came. The four-day trek from Mestia to Ushguli is the other way to arrive and is the best-known route in the country, with guesthouses in the villages along it, walkable only in the months the high passes allow.

Down at the other end of the region, Samegrelo is warm, green and almost entirely overlooked by visitors heading for the mountains. Martvili Canyon is its highlight and one of the most enjoyable short outings in Georgia: a limestone gorge with water an improbable colour, travelled by inflatable boat between mossy walls with waterfalls dropping in, and easy enough for anyone. Zugdidi, the regional centre, holds the Dadiani Palace — the seat of the princely family that ruled here, with a museum whose collection includes a death mask of Napoleon that arrived through a marriage into the Bonaparte family, which is not a sentence most travellers expect to read about western Georgia. Zugdidi is also the practical hinge of the whole region, since it is where the overnight train from the capital arrives and where the mountain transfers to Mestia leave — the single most useful connection in Georgian transport, and the reason Svaneti fits into a shorter trip than people expect. Treating it as a stop rather than a platform is an easy improvement to the standard route.