Alphabetic Tower and Miracle Park

The Alphabetic Tower is Batumi's most literal piece of architecture. Two steel strands rise 130 metres in a double helix, and the thirty-three letters of the Georgian alphabet are fixed to them in aluminium, spiralling from the base up to the sphere at the top. It was finished in 2012, part of the building surge that gave the city a skyline in a single decade. The idea — a DNA helix carrying the alphabet as genetic code — sounds heavy-handed written down and works better in the eye. In late afternoon the low sun catches the letters and the whole shaft turns copper; at night the tower is lit and the letters read clearly from a kilometre away. The tower stands in Miracle Park at the northern end of the New Boulevard, and the park, rather than the tower alone, is the reason to walk out here: - Ali and Nino, Tamara Kvesitadze's eight-metre moving sculpture of two figures who drift together, merge and pass through each other over about ten minutes — the best thing on this stretch of coast - The Chacha Tower, a 25-metre clock tower of 2012 built with fountains that were meant to run grape spirit; they do not - Batumi lighthouse, cast iron, working since 1863 and the oldest structure on the whole seafront - The Ferris wheel and the port breakwater, where anglers line up at dusk Access to the observation level and the restaurant sphere has opened and closed repeatedly over the years, so treat the climb as a bonus rather than a plan. The view from the ground is the point anyway: sea on one side, the Adjaran ridges standing behind the city on the other, and Batumi's odd, half-finished collage of towers in between.

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