Snow-white hotels with balconies near the coastline, palm trees, roses and oleanders, turquoise sea, all-inclusive food and Russian spoken everywhere. No, this is not Turkey or Sochi: Abkhazia has actively entered the fight for Russian tourists. Resorts, some of which received this status even before the revolution, were already well known to us. Now the republic intends to prove that it is ready to compete with the most popular holiday destinations. The number of hotels here is growing every year, and new facilities and entertainment are added to the already familiar attractions, familiar to Sochi vacationers from day tours.
New hotels – new holidaymakers
About 20 years ago, Abkhazia attracted only adventurous tourists. The devastation of the 1992-1993 war and the subsequent sanctions turned Gagra and Pitsunda, famous throughout the Soviet Union, into ghost resorts, with collapsed sanatorium boxes, abandoned Stalin-era holiday homes and pre-revolutionary villas slowly becoming overgrown with ivy.
At that time, the tourist infrastructure was made up of private entrepreneurs; accommodation in UAZ and excursions to the mountains had to be negotiated. Rare tourists aroused great interest – they were recognized in cafes, they were served chacha and fig jam. The beaches were deserted and wide. And only the famous colonnade of Gagra stood as if nothing had happened, only slightly crumbled with plaster.
Today Gagra, Pitsunda, Sukhumi, Gudauta have returned to tourists in their former quality with holiday homes, hotels, new spa hotels and reconstructed sanatoriums with therapeutic and preventive programs and all-inclusive meals.
“Recently, we have been working to increase the flow of tourists. If you look at the flow from the post-Covid period in 2021 to the present day, we see an increase every year,” he said. The Ministry of Tourism of Abkhazia said at a meeting with journalists. “If in 2021 there were about 1.1 million tourists, then in 2023 there will be 1.4 million.”
According to the official, this is due to the increase in the number of hotels: “New comfortable hotels have appeared in Abkhazia, which can offer our guests a holiday similar to the holiday on the Turkish coast.”
Russian tour operators saw prospects in Abkhazia a few years ago.
“In recent years, Abkhazia has become one of the strategic directions of our product portfolio. This is facilitated by the continuous development of the hotel base and the accompanying tourist infrastructure. The main thing is that the level of service is increasing, and more and more resorts are paying great attention to improving service standards,” Oksana Bulakh, commercial director of the national tour operator “Alean”, told socialbites.ca.
He noted that the tour operator now has more than 150 accommodation facilities in its portfolio.
We are going to Gagra
To relax in the style of “Sign, you won’t believe it!” Fly to Adler, drive to the Abkhazian border (it will take 10 minutes), cross the border using your internal passport and go to your destination.
The nearest settlement where you can settle is the village of Tsandripsh. And 22 km from the border lies the city of Gagra, which even before the revolution grew up practically on malarial swamps and turned into a resort for first the Russian nobility, and then the Soviet elite.
The honor of creating a climatic resort in the former malarial swamps belongs to the husband of Prince Alexander Petrovich of Oldenburg, grandson of Nicholas I, who visited these places in the spring of 1901. It was he who saw the potential in Gagra and convinced Nicholas II to allocate funds for the construction of the resort. Accompanied by specialists (a doctor, an architect, a process engineer), he returned and landed near the Gagra fortress. Here there was no longer a need for a fortress, but a resort.
This is how a hydropathic clinic, the famous Gagripsh Hotel with a clock on the facade, where the restaurant is now located, and Primorsky Park appeared. In 1902, a castle in the Art Nouveau style was built on the mountain for the Prince of Oldenburg – now it looks from top to bottom with empty windows, but as guide Jumber Gunia told socialbites.ca, the building has already begun to be restored. True, with private money and for someone’s personal needs.
Gagra has been properly restored – the Seaside Park, the temple of St. Hypatius of Gagra, built in the 6th century, the walls of the Abaata fortress in the old part of the city, Soviet rest houses and sanatoriums in the newly adopted part. And what has not been restored is gradually covered with ivy, and only occasionally the outlines of luxurious pre-revolutionary villas appear.
If you go from the park overgrown with bamboo, acacia, palm trees – in total, more than 800 species of plants are planted here – towards the colonnade, towards New Gagra, sooner or later the road will run along the rows of sanatoriums and rest houses – restored, rebuilt, under construction. Others amaze you with the splendor of the Stalinist Empire style – you immediately understand how Soviet officials rested.
Now you can still find the same atmosphere – but of course it won’t be pristine. For example, a separate new building was built for the Nart Spa Hotel, which was renovated in 2022, while the old buildings from 1974 were restored, preserving the semicircular arches, ceiling heights, wall thicknesses and the overall solid holiday home feel. But back then there was no spa, no hammam, no heated pool.
Take a deeper breath
Abkhazia has always been an ideal place for a sanatorium holiday – its resorts competed with Crimea for the title of all-Union health resort, and it is still unclear who won. Today, the sanatoriums of Gagra and Pitsunda offer programs aimed at prevention, treatment and a simple, uncomplicated beach holiday with three meals a day and a movie in the evening.
Staying in a sanatorium may mean that you will not want to leave the facility; when you plan on five procedures a day (you can do more, but it is not necessary), you barely have enough time to rest.
Spa hotel “Alex” in Gagra has become a pioneer in the field of sanatorium and resort recreation in this new stage of tourism development in Abkhazia. As the deputy director of the hotel Elena Chastukhina said, the hotel is already 13 years old and opened its doors as a sanatorium in 2015 – an endoecological rehabilitation program was launched here. Now it has its own detox program, as well as mineral water from the spring and hydrogen sulfide baths.
After all, Gagra is a city, so those who want to completely break away from urban reality can go to the Boxwood Grove sanatorium, which is not far from Pitsunda. It was discovered in the early 90s and is now experiencing a rebirth in almost its original form. Only the rooms are modern.
The fact that people come to the “Boxwood Grove” for treatment and recovery can be seen from the large number of gray-haired ladies armed with Nordic walking poles and families with children in strollers queuing up for oxygen cocktails. Vacationers who are not busy with procedures or doctor’s visits spend most of their time in the hotel’s arboretum, which can be compared to a botanical garden – a wide variety of trees and shrubs can be found here. Japanese osmanthus, Himalayan cedar, Indian lagerstroemia (originally from China and Korea), native nandina (from China and Japan), North American Liquidambra: all these plants are equipped with signs by which the vacationer can get the information he lacks about the plant kingdom.
Still, the main plant in Pitsunda is the Pitsunda pine. Walking through the grove, which stretches for 4 km along the sea, is a healing experience in itself, because the air saturated with phytoncides is priceless.
Leaving the coast
The Ministry of Tourism of Abkhazia says that they are ready to compete not only with Turkey and Sochi. Another task is to expand the scope of the holiday season, which today lasts from the beginning of June to September.
“We want to switch to an off-season format. So that Abkhazia has year-round recreation,” Deputy Minister of Tourism of Abkhazia Astamur Bartsits told socialbites.ca.
To this end, they are trying to develop an excursion direction in Abkhazia – so that tourists get to know not only New Athos with its famous Lake Ritsa and truly impressive caves.
In 2021, not far from Gudauta, the Apsny Park ethnopark opened – a large-scale, elegantly designed ethnovillage, where you can get acquainted with the culture and life of the Abkhaz people not only in an excursion format. After all, it’s one thing to see dishes from which traditional corn flour is prepared, and quite another to see how it is cooked in practice and be convinced that this is a difficult task (then it would be a shame not to finish it).
For example, in the ethnopark you can learn that there are three types of Abkhaz dwellings – from the simplest hut to a spacious house. In the traditional Abkhaz apatsha there are two halves – male and female. There are also two types of saddles for riding (male and female).
It is better to look at the exhibits with a guide – otherwise when you look at the baby’s crib you will not understand why there are no sides. However, we have a chance to understand this even without a guide; most of the items are equipped with signs with detailed explanations in Abkhazian and Russian. The exhibits in the ethnopark are original: the entire contents of traditional Abkhaz houses appeared thanks to local residents who brought their family items. The tablets here indicate the origin of things.
For today’s Abkhazia, it is as important to show the uniqueness of its culture as it is to build hotels in Gagra, Pitsunda, New Athos, Gudauta and Sukhumi. The sea, snow-white hotels, beaches, palm trees and all-inclusive accommodation can indeed be found in Turkey. But the love for a very complex history and culture that permeates everything here is harder to find.