In by the sea and out through the capital, by way of the south. A day in Batumi, with the Roman fortress of Gonio and the Borjgalo museum, and then inland: the boat through the Martvili canyon and Prometheus Cave, with a night in Kutaisi. The fourth day is short, 182 km: the park in Borjomi, where you drink the mineral water from the tap, and Akhaltsikhe, with the afternoon for Rabati castle. The fifth is Vardzia, Queen Tamar's carved city, and Khertvisi fortress, arriving in Tbilisi in the afternoon.
The sixth is the capital on foot, from Rustaveli to the sulphur baths, and the seventh the transfer to the airport. A trip without high mountains and with a single long day, the Vardzia one. Hotels in Batumi, Kutaisi, Akhaltsikhe and Tbilisi, category of your choice.
Itinerary
Day 1 - Transfer from Batumi airport to Batumi
Total road of the day - 0KM 0 Hours and 0 Minutes We pick you up at the airport whenever your flight lands and go to the hotel. No more programme today. Road 0KM 0 Hours and 0 MinutesDay 2 - Batumi and surroundings
Total road of the day - 27KM 0 Hours and 50 Minutes Today the car is only the means: 27 km to reach Borjgalo Ethnographic Museum and Gonio Fortress. Road 6KM 0 Hours and 15 MinutesBorjgalo Ethnographic Museum
It is not a museum in the usual sense. Borjgalo was made by hand by Kemal Turmanidze, a sculptor from the area, and opened in 2016 on the outskirts of Batumi, near the airport: models and near life-size wooden figures showing how people lived in the villages of Adjara a hundred years ago, the house, the mill, the forge, the wedding, the beekeeper. Many pieces move or make sounds, and Kemal himself or his family are usually around.
It works very well with children and with anyone who is tired of churches by now. An hour. It sits on a residential street with nothing around it, so do not expect a café.
Gonio Fortress
Fifteen kilometres south of Batumi, almost on the Turkish border, the Romans built the camp of Apsaros in the 1st century to watch the coast, and the walls are still standing: a rectangle with a perimeter of almost 900 metres and 18 of its original 22 towers. Later the Byzantines and the Ottomans used it, and the Ottomans called it Gonio. Inside there is a small museum with the finds from the digs, the remains of Roman baths and a grave that tradition attributes to the apostle Matthias, the one who replaced Judas. No proof, but people come to pray.
It is a 45-minute stop, flat and without shade; in summer bring a cap. If there is time, Gonio beach is next door and is one of the quietest in the area.
Day 3 - Batumi - Martvili - Promete - Kutaisi
Total road of the day - 240KM 4 Hours and 16 Minutes 240 km and 4 hours 16 minutes in the car in all. Today's stops: Martvili Canyon and Prometheus Cave. Road 163KM 3 Hours and 0 MinutesMartvili Canyon
The water of the Abasha river is a turquoise that looks edited. It is not: this is Martvili canyon, in Samegrelo, three and a quarter hours from Mestia and the most visited canyon in western Georgia. It has two sections. In the upper one you take a boat ride of about fifteen minutes between walls 20 to 40 metres high; in the lower one there are walkways and a waterfall. It was the bathing place of the Dadiani princes, whose palace was in Zugdidi. Since it was developed in 2016 there is a ticket office, a car park and quite a crowd; on July and August weekends there is a queue for the boats [DATO: precio de entrada y de la barca en 2026]. We do the boat as soon as we arrive and then the walkways, half an hour without hurrying. If the river is swollen after rain, the boats do not go out and the water loses its colour; on those days we swap the order with Okatse.
Prometheus Cave
Inside it is 14 degrees all year round, which is welcome in summer and in winter too: bring a jacket. Prometheus Cave is at Kumistavi, 20 km from Kutaisi, next to the spa town of Tskaltubo. It was discovered in 1984 and opened to the public in 2011 with a route of just over a kilometre through six of its 22 halls, on concrete walkways with coloured lights that some people like and others do not. The name is for the titan who, according to the Greeks, ended up chained in these mountains; Georgians call him Amirani.
The visit takes a good hour. At the end, if the underground river has enough water, you can leave by boat along a stretch of about 300 metres, paid separately; when the level drops, you walk out. The floor is damp and slippery, so closed shoes are better.
Day 4 - Kutaisi - Borjomi - Akhaltsikhe
Total road of the day - 182KM 3 Hours and 6 Minutes In the morning, Borjomi; in the afternoon, Rabati Fortress. 182 km in all. Road 130KM 2 Hours and 16 MinutesBorjomi
The fizzy water drunk all over the former Soviet Union comes from here, and it has been bottled since 1890. Borjomi was the spa of the Romanovs, who built themselves a palace at Likani, at the entrance to the town, and what remains of that is the air of a spa town from another age: wooden villas, a central park of 1850 with the spring where anyone can fill a bottle (it comes out warm, salty and fizzy, and not everyone likes it) and a cable car up to a viewpoint with a Ferris wheel.
An hour for the park and the spring; for walkers, the 3 km path to the sulphur pools in the forest starts at the far end of the park. The town is the gateway to the Borjomi-Kharagauli national park and the last stop with shops and banks before Vardzia.
Rabati Fortress, Akhaltsikhe
A 9th-century fortress that was Ottoman for 250 years, with its mosque of 1578, its madrasa and its baths, and which the government rebuilt entirely in a single year in 2012: new stone, gardens, fountains, a hotel inside and even a swimming pool. The result is debated. To us Rabati is a good place to understand Samtskhe-Javakheti, the region where Georgians, Armenians, Turks and Jews have lived side by side, and the museum in the citadel tells that story well. Ten minutes on foot is the Akhaltsikhe synagogue of 1863, still open.
An hour and a quarter. If you like real ruins, you will not find them here; if you like climbing towers and looking at the valley, you will. It is the logical stop before Vardzia, 60 km away.
Day 5 - Akhaltsikhe - Vardzia - Khertvisi - Tbilisi
Total road of the day - 287KM 5 Hours and 30 Minutes First Vardzia, then Khertvisi Fortress. 287 km, 5 hours 30 minutes; lunch on the way. Road 60KM 1 Hours and 20 MinutesVardzia
A rock face 500 metres long riddled with 19 storeys of openings: that is Vardzia, the cave monastery Queen Tamar finished around 1185 in the Mtkvari valley, 60 km from Akhaltsikhe. It once had thousands of rooms; the earthquake of 1283 took the whole front off and exposed what you see today, some 600 rooms including cells, wine cellars, refectories, a pharmacy and irrigation channels cut into the stone. In the Church of the Dormition are the 12th-century frescoes, with one of the few portraits of Tamar made in her lifetime.
It is still a monastery, with a few monks, so some areas are closed. The visit takes an hour and a half, almost all of it on stairs and through narrow tunnels: not for bad knees or claustrophobia, although there are routes that avoid the passages. In summer the sun hits the wall from mid-morning; we go as early as we can.
Khertvisi Fortress
Where the Paravani river meets the Mtkvari, on the way to Vardzia, a castle perches on a crag that has been there in one form or another since the 2nd century BC; legend says Alexander the Great destroyed it, though he never came this way. The walls and towers you see date from the 10th to the 14th century, with a church of 985 inside. Khertvisi watched the road between Georgia and the Ottoman Empire, and changed hands as often as the region did.
A 20-minute stop, with a short, steep climb to the towers for anyone who wants the view of the valley. There is a secret tunnel that went down to the river, closed today.
Day 6 - Tbilisi - Guided tour in Spanish
No driving Today: Rustaveli Avenue, Metekhi Square, Narikala Fortress, Abanotubani and Anchiskhati.Rustaveli Avenue
A kilometre and a half of plane trees between Freedom Square and Rustaveli Square. This is the street where Tbilisi shows off: the Parliament, the Moorish-looking Opera House of 1896, the Rustaveli Theatre, the Kashueti church, the National Museum and the grand hotels of the early 20th century. It is named after Shota Rustaveli, the 12th-century poet who wrote "The Knight in the Panther's Skin", the book every Georgian can quote.
It takes a good half hour on foot, or two metro stops if the heat is on. In front of the Parliament there is a plaque worth stopping for: on 9 April 1989 the Soviet army broke up a demonstration here and twenty-one people died, almost all of them women. That day still weighs on the politics of the country.
Metekhi Square
The king on horseback looking over the city from the cliff is Vakhtang Gorgasali, the founder of Tbilisi according to tradition; the statue dates from 1967. Next to him, the church of Metekhi, from the late 13th century, built by Demetre II on top of another from the 5th. The royal palace stood here for centuries, and in the 19th century and Soviet times the building was a prison: Gorky did time in it. Then it was a theatre, and in 1988 it became a church again.
We come here for the view, the best of the lower town: the sulphur baths right below, Narikala opposite and the river running between the two. It is a fifteen-minute stop that almost always runs longer because of the photos.
Narikala Fortress
We take the cable car that leaves from Rike Park and crosses the river in two minutes; it costs the same as a metro ticket and is paid with the same card. At the top is Narikala, or what is left of it: the Persians founded it in the 4th century, the Arabs enlarged it in the 8th and the Georgians in the 12th, and in 1827 an explosion of the gunpowder store took out a good part of the walls. The church of St Nicholas inside dates from 1997, on medieval foundations.
The reason to come up is not the stones but the view: the whole old town, the domes of the baths, the river and Metekhi opposite. Careful, the walls have no railings and the rock is polished by so many feet. From here we walk down through the Betlemi quarter to the baths, passing the Mother of Georgia on the way, the aluminium statue of 1958 that watches over the city with a cup in one hand and a sword in the other.
Abanotubani
Tbilisi means "warm place", and the warmth comes from here. Abanotubani is the sulphur bath district, on the right bank of the Mtkvari just below Narikala: brick domes at ground level with the baths underneath, and water that comes up on its own at 37 to 40 degrees and smells of eggs. Legend has it that King Vakhtang Gorgasali founded the city in the 5th century after seeing a wounded pheasant healed in these waters. Pushkin bathed here in 1829 and wrote that he had never seen anything like it.
You can stroll and look, but what is worth it is going in: a private room with a hot-water pool and, if you like, a scrub with a coarse mitt that leaves you like new. Booking is needed in high season, and you bring swimwear and a towel or rent them. The blue-tiled façade belongs to the Orbeliani bath; the others are plainer outside.
Anchiskhati
It is the oldest church still standing in Tbilisi, and it does not look it: a small three-nave basilica of plain stone, tucked into a street of the old town. King Dachi, son of Vakhtang Gorgasali, built it around the year 530. The name comes from the Christ icon of Ancha, which arrived here in 1664 from an area that is now Turkey and is now kept in the Art Museum. The brick bell tower of 1675 is what you see from the street.
If it falls on a Sunday morning, we go in during the liturgy: the Anchiskhati choir sings Georgian polyphony the way it was sung centuries ago, and it is one of the things people remember most from the trip. On other days it is almost empty and takes ten minutes. There are headscarves at the door for women.
