The Black Sea Coast
Georgia stops at the water.
You can drive the whole coast in a morning, and it changes underfoot the entire way - black magnetic sand at the northern end, grey pebble all the way down to the Turkish border, and subtropical forest leaning over the lot of it.
Follow the coast southLooking north from Mtsvane Kontskhi
The coast, end to end
Sand at one end, pebbles at the other.
Hover or tap a stop on the shoreline to see what that stretch looks like - and what it is actually made of underfoot.
50 km north of Batumi
Ureki
The stretch of the coast that is properly sandy, and the sand is black. Grigoleti sits just north of Ureki and Shekvetili just south, and all three share the same belt: roughly a quarter of it is magnetite, ground off the volcanic highlands and carried down the Supsa and the Natanebi. It is heavier underfoot than sand has any right to be.
Magnetic black sand
Road kilometres from Batumi, rounded · swipe the shoreline
Batumi · kilometre zero
The only city on the coast, and it works two shifts.
By day it is a seaside town: seven kilometres of boulevard under palms and plane trees, bicycles, a pebble beach the whole length of it, and the mountains standing directly behind the last row of buildings.
After dark it turns into something else entirely - a skyline of casinos and glass towers with a Ferris wheel built into the side of one of them, and an alphabet spiralling up a 130-metre tower in lights. Nowhere else in Georgia looks remotely like this.
- 7 km
- Seafront boulevard
- 130 m
- Alphabet Tower
- 33
- Letters spiralling it
Daytime
Drag the sun across the city
Tsikhisdziri · 23 km north
A fortress put here because the coast bends.
In the sixth century Justinian built a fortified city on this headland and called it Petra - the rock. Its acropolis sits on a cliff straight above the water, with a Laz settlement underneath it that was already old when the Byzantines arrived. Whoever held it held the shipping lane.
The reason is still obvious from the top. The coastline swings here, and you can see it swing - the beach curving away north towards Kobuleti with the railway pinned between the forest and the stones, close enough to the sea to get wet.
Mtsvane Kontskhi · 9 km north
Nine world floras, stacked on one headland.
Green Cape, and the botanical garden that has been growing on it since 1912. Andrei Krasnov laid it out in departments, one per corner of the world, and let the Adjaran rain do the rest.
It runs from a ridge above the railway right down to the sea, so you walk out of the Himalayas into Mexico and come out on a beach. Of the woody species growing here, a hundred-odd are Caucasian endemics and the rest were carried in - which makes this less a park than a working argument that anything will grow on this coast.
- HimalayaCedar, pine, rhododendron
- East AsiaBamboo, camellia, magnolia
- MexicoAgave and highland pine
- AustraliaEucalyptus and acacia
- New ZealandTree ferns and podocarps
- MediterraneanCypress, olive, laurel
- North AmericaSequoia, oak, magnolia
- South AmericaAraucaria and myrtle
- CaucasusThe forest already here
- 1912
- Opened
- 110 ha
- One headland
- 2,037
- Woody species
The southern end
The last nineteen kilometres.
South of Batumi the country narrows to a strip between the mountains and the sea, and then it simply runs out.
4 km to go
Gonio
A Roman fort at the mouth of the Chorokhi, garrisoned in the first century AD and held afterwards by Byzantium and the Ottomans. The walls and towers are still standing; the beach starts where they end.
2 km to go
Kvariati
The clearest water on the Georgian coast, because there is almost no sand left in it by this point - just stone, and the seabed dropping away fast.
The border
Sarpi
The last village. The pebbles run up against the frontier, the road stops, and the same coastline carries on into Turkey without you.
When to come
The sea stays warm long after the mountains have closed.
- J
- F
- M
- A
- M
- J
- J
- A
- S
- O
- N
- D
- Swimming runs roughly June to October, and August is the warmest the water gets.
- Adjara is the wettest corner of Georgia. That is the trade-off, and it is also the reason everything here is so green.
- September is the quiet answer: the crowd has gone home and the sea has not noticed yet.
The other half
When the water finally cools, the snow is already waiting a few hours inland.