Kolkheti National Park and Lake Paliastomi

Kolkheti is what the whole Georgian Black Sea coast looked like before the drainage engineers arrived. The national park protects a little under thirty thousand hectares of it: rain-fed peat bogs, flooded alder swamp, sand dunes, the lower Rioni and Pichori rivers, and Lake Paliastomi, a shallow brackish lagoon of roughly eighteen square kilometres just south of Poti.

The bogs are why UNESCO added the park to the World Heritage list in 2021, as part of the Colchic Rainforests and Wetlands. They are domed sphagnum bogs fed only by rainfall rather than groundwater, some of them more than ten metres deep, and there is nothing quite like them at this latitude anywhere else. Peat has been accumulating here for something like ten thousand years, since the sea last drew back. On the Imnati boardwalk you can feel the entire surface flex under your feet.

Most of the Colchis lowland no longer looks like this. From the 1930s the marshes were drained and planted with eucalyptus to drive out malaria, and something close to two-thirds of the original wetland was lost. What the park holds is the remainder, and it still shrinks at the edges wherever peat is cut and channels are dug.

Paliastomi was a freshwater lake until the channel to the sea was deepened. It is brackish now, nowhere much more than three metres deep, and warm by late summer. Its reed beds and the alder woods along the Pichori are the best part of a visit. Boats leave from the landing on the north shore and run upriver between trees standing in water, past cormorant roosts and, in the right months, pelicans, glossy ibis and squacco herons.

The park lies under one of the busiest migration corridors in Eurasia. In September and October the stream of raptors that made the Batumi bottleneck famous passes overhead, and the marshes fill with waders. Spring brings breeding birds and the loudest frog chorus you are ever likely to hear.

Summer is hot, humid and full of mosquitoes; the reeds are high and the birds are quiet. Come in the shoulder seasons if you have the choice. Late autumn is the best of it, when the light lies flat on the lake and, on a clear morning, the main Caucasus range shows far off to the north-east.