Region · the Caucasus
The Most Beautiful Places in the Caucasus
5 places · every one real, mapped, and worth the trip
The Greater Caucasus runs about 1,100 kilometres between the Black Sea and the Caspian, thrown up where the Arabian plate drives north into Eurasia. It is a genuine mountain barrier — higher than the Alps, less developed, and holding Europe's highest summit — with glaciated peaks above villages that were effectively cut off for most of the year until recently.
This is our editors' pick across Georgia and the Russian Caucasus. It is deliberately short: this is a young part of the atlas, and we would rather name five places we have written up properly than pad the list with names we have not.
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Mount Elbrus The roof of Europe
Kabardino-Balkaria, Caucasus, Russia
A twin-coned dormant volcano wrapped in 22 glaciers and rising 5,642 metres — the highest summit in Europe, and far higher than anything in the Alps.
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Mount Ushba The Matterhorn of the Caucasus
Upper Svaneti, Greater Caucasus, Georgia
Twin granite horns above Georgian Svaneti, split by an icefall. Not the highest peak in the range, but the one that defines its skyline and the hardest serious climb in it.
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Mount Kazbek & Gergeti The Georgian icon
Kazbegi, Greater Caucasus, Georgia
A 5,000-metre glaciated cone standing over the Khevi highlands, with a hilltop church in the foreground that has become the country's most photographed view.
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Martvili Canyon Turquoise water in limestone
Samegrelo, western Georgia
A narrow limestone gorge in western Georgia where the Abasha river runs an improbable blue-green, walked on boardwalks and floated by boat.
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Prometheus Cave
Imereti, near Kutaisi, western Georgia
One of Georgia's great show caves near Kutaisi — kilometres of chambers, stalactites and an underground river you can cross by boat.
The Caucasus is a summer range for most visitors: the high passes and mountain roads into Svaneti and Khevi are reliable roughly June to September, and much of the high country is snowbound outside that. Western Georgia's canyons and caves stay accessible far longer. This list will grow as the atlas covers more of the range — Tusheti, the Svaneti glaciers, and the Azerbaijani and Armenian flanks are all still to come.
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