Batumi

Batumi is the capital of Adjara and Georgia's busiest seaside city. The compact old town around Europe Square and the Piazza mixes 19th-century merchant houses with cafes, wine bars and churches, and a mosque and a synagogue stand a few streets apart. To the south, the seafront has grown since the 2000s into a skyline of hotels and residential towers, linked by the long Batumi Boulevard. Most visitors come for the beach in summer, but the city works all year as a base for Gonio, the Botanical Garden, Mtirala and trips into the mountains.

Start with a walk along the boulevard, then ride the Argo cable car up Anuria hill for views over the port and the coast. Europe Square, with its statue of Medea holding the Golden Fleece, is a reminder that this coast was part of ancient Colchis, the land of the Argonaut legend. In the evening, eat Adjarian khachapuri in the old town, or buy fish at the fish market and have it cooked next door. Pack for rain at any time of year: Batumi is the wettest city in Georgia.

Ancient writers knew a harbour called Bathys on this coast, part of the Colchian world. For much of the early modern period Batumi was under Ottoman rule, which ended in 1878 when the Congress of Berlin awarded it to the Russian Empire. It was a free port until 1886, the railway from Baku and Tbilisi arrived in 1883, and Batumi became the empire's chief Black Sea oil port, with Rothschild and Nobel companies both active here; a pipeline from Baku followed in 1907. Large-scale redevelopment of the seafront began in the 2000s.