Why go
Perched at 2,100 metres on the Meskheti Range, Gomismta was conceived in the late 19th century as a Tsarist-era climatic sanatorium—physicians prescribed its thin, pine-scented air for tuberculosis and nervous exhaustion. The settlement grew around a single belvedere hotel whose terrace still commands one of Georgia's most vertiginous panoramas: the Black Sea glittering 25 kilometres south, the Colchic lowlands a patchwork of tea plantations and citrus groves, and on crystalline days, the lighthouse at Poti visible as a silver pin. Soviet workers' unions maintained modest holiday homes here; today the road crumbles, the population thins, and the silence feels earned rather than abandoned. You come for the altitude, the abandoned modernist balconies, and the understanding that Georgia's mountains have always been its sanatoriums.