The abandoned sanatoriums of Tskaltubo

A resort built for the elite, and later a refuge for the displaced

Few places in Georgia carry as many layers of unresolved history in as small an area as Tskaltubo. What began as a grand Soviet spa town, purpose-built around naturally warm radon-carbonate springs to host party officials, war veterans and, according to persistent local accounts, Stalin himself, spent the second half of its life as something entirely different: informal, long-term housing for families displaced by a war that had nothing to do with the resort’s original purpose.

Walking between its roughly twenty grand sanatorium buildings today means moving through both stories at once — faded Soviet grandeur and a more recent, still partly unresolved, chapter of displacement — and understanding both is essential to visiting the town with any real sense of what you are looking at.

Why Tskaltubo was built the way it was

For visitors coming from Kutaisi expecting another stop on the region’s usual circuit of canyons and monasteries, Tskaltubo takes some recalibration: there is no single monument to photograph and move on from, but an entire town’s worth of buildings, each with its own condition, history and, in some cases, still-living connection to the displacement story layered on top of the original Soviet one.

Tskaltubo’s mineral springs had a reputation reaching back to the nineteenth century, but it was Soviet planning from the 1950s onward that turned the town into a purpose-built health resort on a genuinely grand scale: around twenty large sanatoriums, each architecturally distinct, arranged around a central park, with a dedicated bathhouse complex offering the radon-carbonate treatments that were the resort’s core draw.

Access was tightly linked to status — places were allocated through trade unions, state institutions and military channels rather than sold freely — and Tskaltubo functioned as a genuine prestige destination within the Soviet system, drawing visitors from across the union rather than only Georgia. The scale of investment is still visible in the buildings themselves: colonnaded facades, elaborate lobbies, mosaic and tilework that would be expensive to reproduce today, built for a clientele the state wanted to impress.

From Kutaisi: Soviet Era Sanatoriums of Tskaltubo covers this Soviet-era story specifically — the architecture, the springs, and how the resort functioned at its peak — for anyone whose interest leans toward the grandeur rather than the more recent history layered on top of it.

The waters themselves

The springs that built Tskaltubo’s reputation are naturally warm, low-radioactivity radon-carbonate mineral waters, historically used for treating joint conditions, circulatory problems and general convalescence — the same broad category of therapeutic bathing found at Borjomi and other Georgian spa towns, though Tskaltubo’s waters and their claimed effects were specific enough to justify an entire resort built around them rather than a single bathhouse.

A handful of bathhouses and at least one restored sanatorium still operate using the same source water today, offering a functioning counterpoint to the empty buildings around them, and a more comfortable way to actually experience what drew visitors here in the first place than touring the ruins alone.

Two Tskaltubos: the park and the bathhouse district

Tskaltubo is really two connected areas rather than one site. A wooded central park, laid out with the same formal Soviet planning logic seen in resort towns across the former union, links the individual sanatorium buildings, each set back from the others with its own grounds and driveway rather than packed tightly together — a deliberate design choice meant to give each guest the impression of a private retreat rather than a mass-market facility.

A separate bathhouse district, a short walk from the park, held the actual treatment buildings where the mineral water was administered, including Bathhouse No. 6, commonly cited among locals and visiting guides as the building where Stalin himself is said to have bathed on his visits, whether or not every detail of that story can be verified with documentary certainty. Understanding this layout before you arrive makes a self-guided wander considerably easier to navigate than treating the whole town as one undifferentiated site.

Architecture worth noticing

Individually, several of Tskaltubo’s sanatoriums are worth a slower look purely as buildings. Sanatorium Medea and Sanatorium Iveria, among the names repeatedly cited in accounts of the resort, show the kind of Stalinist neoclassical detailing — columned porticoes, symmetrical facades, elaborate plasterwork in the lobbies — that Soviet planners reserved for buildings meant to project status.

Later additions from subsequent decades shift toward plainer modernist forms, a visible architectural timeline of Soviet taste across roughly three decades of construction if you know to look for it. Much of this detail survives in surprisingly good condition given decades of non-maintenance, though damp, vegetation and structural failure have taken a heavier toll on some buildings than others, which is part of why guided access to specific, currently stable interiors is worth more here than simply wandering toward whichever facade looks most impressive from outside.

After independence: closure and decline

Tskaltubo’s decline began with the collapse of the Soviet system that had built and funded it: state subsidies for spa holidays disappeared, the trade union allocation system that filled its rooms ended, and most of the sanatoriums closed within a few years of Georgian independence in 1991. Buildings built for hundreds of guests at a time stood largely empty through the early 1990s, at exactly the moment Georgia was also absorbing the shock of the 1992-93 war in Abkhazia and the wave of displaced people it produced.

Displacement: how the sanatoriums became homes

Tens of thousands of ethnic Georgians were displaced from Abkhazia during and after the 1992-93 war, and Tskaltubo’s largely vacant sanatorium buildings became, almost by default, long-term informal housing for a significant number of these families — not a planned resettlement so much as available shelter absorbed into use because nothing better existed.

What was intended as a temporary arrangement stretched, for many families, into decades: children were born and grew up inside former hotel rooms, communities formed within specific buildings, and generations passed with displacement still officially “temporary” on paper. In recent years, government-backed resettlement programmes have moved a substantial number of these families into proper permanent housing elsewhere, but the process has taken far longer than anyone displaced in the 1990s could reasonably have expected, and some buildings retained inhabited sections well into the 2020s.

Tskaltubo: Ghost City History Mystery Soviet Sanatoriums is built specifically around this fuller story — Soviet grandeur and post-war displacement together — with a guide who can explain which buildings are now fully vacated and which, at the time of any given visit, may still hold residents.

What resettlement actually changed

The resettlement programmes of recent years, which moved a substantial share of Tskaltubo’s long-term displaced residents into newly built or renovated permanent housing, changed the practical experience of visiting the sanatoriums considerably.

Buildings that once had occupied wings alongside empty, decaying sections now stand largely or fully vacant, which has made informal access easier in one sense — fewer inhabited spaces to avoid — but has not resolved the underlying story: families who spent up to three decades in what was meant to be temporary shelter are only now, in many cases, settling into housing intended to be permanent. Some buildings, depending on the pace of resettlement at the time of any given visit, may still hold a handful of residents, and it remains good practice to assume a building could be occupied until you can see clearly that it is not.

Visiting: what you will actually see

The condition of Tskaltubo’s sanatoriums varies enormously from building to building. Some have collapsed floors, missing staircases and genuinely hazardous structural damage; others remain walkable with reasonable care, their grand lobbies, faded murals and abandoned furniture still largely intact, covered in dust and creeping vegetation rather than rubble.

None of them are set up as formal museums, with signage or protective barriers — this is unmanaged, ongoing decay rather than curated ruin, which is part of what makes the town feel so different from a conventional heritage site. A guide who visits regularly and knows the current state of specific buildings is worth the cost here more than at almost any other stop in this guide, since the risk of a genuinely dangerous floor or staircase is real rather than theoretical.

Batumi: Tskaltubo Abandoned Sanatoriums Drone Photo Tour pairs ground-level access to several sanatoriums with drone photography of the wider site, useful for capturing the scale of the resort — twenty large buildings arranged around a central park — that is hard to appreciate from inside any single one of them.

Photographing Tskaltubo responsibly

Tskaltubo’s combination of Soviet grandeur and lived-in decline has made it a well-known stop for urban explorers and photographers, and it is worth thinking through what that attention means for a place that, for many of the families who called it home, represents genuine hardship rather than an aesthetic. Some rooms still hold personal belongings left behind during resettlement; some sections of some buildings may still be inhabited depending on when you visit.

Treating the site with the same basic courtesy you would extend to any stranger’s home — not photographing individuals without asking, not treating occupied or recently occupied spaces as a backdrop — matters here more than almost anywhere else covered in this guide. Photographing Soviet ruins: where the line is goes into this in more depth and is worth reading before a visit focused specifically on photography.

Guided or independent: which makes more sense

Tskaltubo can be visited independently — the town is open, the buildings are not fenced off in any comprehensive way, and nothing legally stops you walking the park and looking at facades from outside. What independent access does not give you is reliable, current knowledge of which specific buildings and floors are structurally sound on the day you visit, since conditions change as buildings continue to deteriorate and as resettlement shifts which sections are occupied.

A guide who visits regularly, ideally one with some direct connection to the town rather than a generic city-based operator, is worth the modest extra cost for both safety and the ability to actually go inside buildings rather than only photograph them from the park paths. If your main interest is the still-functioning bathhouses rather than the ruins, independent access works perfectly well, since those buildings are maintained, staffed and operating on ordinary opening hours rather than requiring any specialist knowledge to visit safely.

What to bring

Sturdy, closed shoes matter more here than almost anywhere else in this guide, given the state of some floors and staircases; broken glass and loose debris are common in the more decayed buildings. A torch is useful for interior spaces with broken or boarded windows, and a mask or scarf for anyone sensitive to dust is a reasonable precaution in the more derelict rooms, where decades of undisturbed dust and mould are the norm rather than the exception. There is minimal visitor infrastructure in the sanatorium park itself — no water sold on site, no toilets geared toward tourists — so treat a Tskaltubo visit with the same self-sufficiency you would bring to a hike rather than assuming amenities will be available.

Getting there from Kutaisi and Tbilisi

Tskaltubo sits a short drive, around fifteen to twenty minutes, from Kutaisi, making it an easy add-on to a Kutaisi-based day rather than requiring a dedicated trip on its own. From Tbilisi, the drive is around three and a half hours, similar to the distance to Chiatura, and most Tbilisi-based visitors combine the two into a single long day rather than visiting either alone. Marshrutkas run from Kutaisi to Tskaltubo regularly, though reaching specific sanatorium buildings from the town centre still generally involves a short taxi ride or a walk, since the resort’s buildings are spread across a wooded park rather than clustered in one compact area.

Soviet Ghost Towns Chiatura Tskaltubo Day Trip combines Tskaltubo with Chiatura in a single organised day, the most efficient way to see both without arranging transport separately for each.

Pairing Tskaltubo with the rest of Imereti

Because it sits so close to Kutaisi, Tskaltubo pairs naturally with the region’s other well-known sites: Prometheus Cave and Sataplia Nature Reserve offer a contrasting natural counterpoint within a short drive, and Bagrati Cathedral and Gelati Monastery cover Kutaisi’s much older history if the Soviet period is only one part of your interest in the region.

For a fuller comparison of Georgia’s Soviet heritage sites side by side, A Soviet heritage day trip from Tbilisi and The Stalin Museum in Gori extend the same period from an entirely different angle — political personality cult rather than leisure and later displacement — and Chiatura’s cable cars covers the industrial side of the same decades a short drive further into Imereti. If bathing rather than history is your main interest, Tskaltubo: radon baths among Soviet ruins covers the still-functioning spa side of the town in more practical detail.

A note on the numbers

Figures for how many people were displaced by the Abkhazia war, and how many ultimately lived in Tskaltubo’s sanatoriums, vary between sources and have shifted over time as resettlement progressed, so treat any single precise figure you encounter — in this guide or elsewhere — with some caution rather than as a settled statistic. What is consistently documented is the scale and duration: a displacement measured in tens of thousands of people across Georgia as a whole, and, for the families specifically housed in Tskaltubo, a “temporary” arrangement that in practice stretched across close to three decades for some households. Those two facts, rather than any specific headcount, are the ones worth carrying into a visit.

The honest picture

Tskaltubo is not a comfortable site in the way that Georgia’s wine regions or mountain villages are comfortable, and it should not be sold as one. It is a place where Soviet-era ambition, post-Soviet collapse and a war most visitors know little about all sit visibly on top of one another, still partly unresolved for some of the families whose displacement it absorbed. That makes it one of the more genuinely important stops in this guide for understanding twentieth-century Georgia beyond the old towns and wine cellars — provided you go with a guide who can explain what you are actually looking at, and with the basic respect the place and its more recent history deserve.

Frequently asked questions about The abandoned sanatoriums of Tskaltubo

Can you still visit the abandoned sanatoriums in Tskaltubo?

Yes, several are accessible, either informally or as part of guided tours, though condition varies enormously between buildings — some have partially collapsed floors and unsafe structures, so a guide who knows which ones are stable is genuinely useful rather than an unnecessary expense.

Why did people live inside the sanatoriums?

After the 1992-93 war in Abkhazia, tens of thousands of ethnic Georgians were displaced, and the largely empty sanatorium buildings in Tskaltubo were used as informal, long-term housing for many of these families, in some cases for close to three decades before resettlement into proper housing.

Are the springs in Tskaltubo still used today?

Some are. A handful of bathhouses and at least one restored sanatorium still operate as functioning spas using the same radon-carbonate mineral water that built the resort’s reputation, alongside the much larger number of buildings that stand empty.

Is it safe to explore the abandoned buildings?

Structurally, no guarantee can be made — floors, ceilings and staircases in several buildings are genuinely unsafe, and going in without local knowledge of which structures are stable is a real risk rather than a minor inconvenience. A guided visit reduces that risk considerably.

How far is Tskaltubo from Kutaisi and Tbilisi?

Tskaltubo is a short drive, around fifteen to twenty minutes, from Kutaisi, and roughly three and a half hours from Tbilisi by road, which puts it comfortably within range of a Kutaisi-based day or a longer day trip from the capital.

Did Stalin actually visit Tskaltubo?

Tskaltubo’s waters had a reputation reaching back to the Russian Empire, and the resort was developed specifically as a prestige destination for the Soviet elite from the 1950s, with Stalin reported among the senior officials who used its baths, though as with much Soviet-era anecdote, individual visits are easier to assert than to verify precisely.

What should I know before photographing the displaced residents’ former homes?

Some buildings still hold personal belongings and signs of recent habitation even after resettlement, and treating them with the same respect you would a stranger’s home, rather than purely as a photogenic backdrop, matters here more than at almost any other Soviet-era site in Georgia.