Why go
Bakhmaro sits at 2,000 meters in the Gurian highlands, a village that began as a 19th-century tuberculosis sanatorium when doctors discovered its rare microclimate—dry air, abundant ultraviolet light, and pine resin vapors that drew patients from across the Russian Empire. The wooden cottages with their distinctive raised balconies still speak to that healing heritage, while the surrounding slopes hold Georgia's highest tea plantations, planted by Gurian settlers returning from Japan in the early 1900s. Today it remains gloriously undeveloped: no ski lifts, no grand hotels, just morning mists that erase the valley below and the sense that you have stumbled into a place time deliberately forgot.