Kazbegi
Georgia's most dramatic landscape.
Kazbegi is four hours from Tbilisi and feels like a different century.
The Georgian Military Highway climbs from the wine valleys of Kakheti through increasingly dramatic mountain scenery until the valley opens up and you see it: Gergeti Trinity Church perched on its spur at 2,170 metres, with the ice-capped summit of Mount Kazbek rising behind it. There is no more powerful mountain image in Europe. Nothing else looks quite like it.
The region has been opening up slowly — Rooms Hotel Kazbegi brought a quality of hospitality that didn't previously exist here, without erasing what made the place worth visiting. The town of Stepantsminda below is still a small mountain village. The trails are still empty by European standards. The food is still the food of a culture that hasn't been packaged for tourism.
Georgia as a whole rewards the curious traveller — extraordinary wine, ancient churches, a culinary tradition unlike any other in the Caucasus. Kazbegi is where you go when you want to understand what the landscape really is.
We started recommending Kazbegi when we realised that a significant number of the travellers we speak to are looking for something that feels less familiar — somewhere the Alps crowd hasn't already been, somewhere the infrastructure hasn't caught up with the landscape. Kazbegi is that place. The mountains are as dramatic as anything in the Alps. The food is extraordinary. The culture is genuinely its own thing — not a version of somewhere else. Rooms Hotel Kazbegi is the reason to go. It's the kind of hotel that changes how you think about a destination — not because it competes with the landscape but because it makes you feel genuinely at home within it. Combine it with three days in Tbilisi if you can. The contrast between the old city and the mountain valley is one of the best short journeys we know.
