Likani Palace (the Romanov summer residence)

Likani is the reason Borjomi became a resort at all. The palace was built between 1892 and 1895 for Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov, to a design by the architect Leon Bilfeld, deep in the Borjomi gorge on the left bank of the Mtkvari.

The building is eclectic in a way that is rare in Georgia: horseshoe arches, ornamental banding and Moorish and Persian motifs grafted onto a European plan, with mosaic floors and carved woodwork inside. The estate had its own small hydroelectric plant, which in the Caucasus of the 1890s was close to unheard of.

The park was laid out at the same time as the house, and the exotic conifers planted in the 1890s are now the tallest trees on the valley floor; they show over the wall even when the gate is closed. Part of the estate served as a sanatorium through the Soviet decades, which is why the approach road is lined with buildings of entirely different intentions.

After 1921 the palace became a Soviet state dacha and Stalin stayed here repeatedly; today it is a residence of the President of Georgia. That is where the warning belongs: this is a working government property, not a museum. Organised tours are sometimes arranged and sometimes not, and the gates can stay shut for weeks, particularly when the residence is in official use. Nobody can guarantee you will get inside.

Even if you do not, Likani is worth a short stop. The road from Borjomi runs along the floor of the gorge with steep forested slopes on both sides, and it is lined with wooden balconied villas of the 1890s and with the concrete blocks of Soviet sanatoria — very nearly an unbroken architectural chronology of a hundred and forty years. The Likani gate of Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park is here too, and the trails start from it.