Upper Svaneti

Roughly 3,500 stone towers still stand across Svaneti, and most of them weren’t built to keep out invaders. Scholars now believe the primary threat the Svans were defending against was each other. Blood feuds ran so deep in medieval Svan society that families would barricade themselves inside their own tower for months at a time, waiting out a vendetta with a neighbor rather than the Mongols or Persians. That single fact reframes everything else you’ll see here. The 200-plus tower houses preserved in Chazhashi, the hamlet that anchors Ushguli, aren’t just picturesque; they’re the physical residue of a defensive culture, upper floors purpose-built with machicolated parapets for throwing projectiles down at whoever was besieging the ground floor.

Upper Svaneti sits in Georgia’s northwest, walled in by peaks over 5,000 meters, with Mount Shkhara topping out at 5,193 meters as the country’s highest point. Mestia is the administrative hub and the practical base for almost everyone’s trip; Ushguli, a UNESCO-listed cluster of villages further up the valley, is often cited as the highest continuously inhabited settlement in Europe, though that claim gets contested by a couple of other high-altitude villages depending on how you define “continuously.” Either way, standing among its towers with Shkhara’s glaciers behind them is one of those views that photographs undersell.

Getting from Mestia to Ushguli is the trip’s real logistical hurdle. It’s about 45 kilometers of unpaved mountain road, rutted and occasionally crossing shallow rivers, and while it isn’t extreme off-roading, a proper 4x4 with real clearance matters, especially after rain or in shoulder season. The drive takes anywhere from ninety minutes to two and a half hours depending on conditions, and there are no petrol stations along the route, so fill up in Mestia. Shared marshrutkas run in the morning from Mestia’s main square for around 20 lari a person, though prices drift, and a private taxi or jeep runs closer to 150 to 200 lari round trip. Build a full day around this excursion rather than treating it as a quick side trip; the road doesn’t reward rushing.

Flying in beats the alternative of a long overland haul from Tbilisi. Vanilla Sky operates short hops into Mestia from Natakhtari airport near Tbilisi several days a week, with the flight itself taking around thirty minutes, plus a slower once-weekly connection from Kutaisi. Both routes have strict baggage limits, typically around 15 kilograms including hand luggage, and both get cancelled outright in poor mountain weather, so don’t schedule anything time-sensitive for the day you fly. If you’d rather see the countryside, the overland drive from Zugdidi through the Enguri gorge is spectacular but long, and winter snow closes sections of it entirely.

Winter changes the character of the whole region in a way summer visitors never see. Hatsvali and Tetnuldi, the two ski areas near Mestia, run cable cars and lifts roughly from late December through early April, and Tetnuldi has hosted stops on the Freeride World Tour, drawing a completely different crowd than the trekkers who show up in July. If you’re chasing solitude among the towers rather than powder, summer between late June and September is still the better call: snow can sit on the higher passes for up to seven months of the year, and several trekking routes simply aren’t passable outside that window.

My honestly held opinion, having read through what draws people here, is that Mestia itself is overrated as a destination and underrated as a base. It’s a pleasant town with good guesthouses and Svan cuisine worth seeking out, khachapuri variants, kubdari meat pastries, and a barley soup called mkhlovana that rarely makes it onto tourist menus, but the real payoff is always somewhere you drive or hike to from there: Ushguli, the Chalaadi glacier tongue an easy walk from town, or the Tetnuldi ridgeline. Don’t let a full day evaporate wandering Mestia’s main square when the towers an hour’s drive away are the actual reason UNESCO listed this place in 1996.

One practical note that trips people up: cell signal and card payment both get patchy fast once you’re off the main road to Ushguli, so carry enough cash in lari to cover meals, guesthouse stays, and jeep fares for the whole loop before you leave Mestia.

History here runs deeper than the towers alone suggest. Evidence of settlement in the valley stretches back roughly 3,000 years, and Svaneti’s isolation, hemmed in on all sides by some of the highest peaks in the Caucasus, meant it was never fully conquered by the empires that passed nearby: Persia, Rome, and later Byzantium all left traces of influence but never full control. That isolation is precisely why so much medieval material survived intact here when it was destroyed or looted elsewhere in Georgia. Local families in Svaneti quietly held onto priceless medieval icons and manuscripts for centuries, hiding them from invaders, and a fair number of those objects only surfaced publicly in the twentieth century, some now displayed in the small history museum in Mestia rather than a national collection in Tbilisi.

Trekking is the other reason people fly into a town this remote. The classic route runs from Mestia to Ushguli over three to four days, threading through smaller villages like Zhabeshi and Adishi, crossing a glacial river that occasionally requires wading if the footbridge is out, and climbing over a pass that tops 2,700 meters. None of it is technical climbing, but it is a genuine multi-day trek requiring proper boots, layers for a fifteen-to-twenty degree temperature swing between valley and pass, and a realistic assessment of your own fitness before committing. Guides aren’t strictly mandatory on the main route the way they are in some Central Asian reserves, but hiring one is worth it here less for safety and more because they’ll point out which towers belong to which historic clan, information you’d otherwise walk straight past.

Wildlife sightings are a real possibility rather than a marketing line. Brown bears, wolves, chamois, and the occasional lynx still move through the upper valleys, though your actual odds of a sighting are low and mostly limited to dawn or dusk near tree line. What you’re far more likely to encounter is a shepherd moving a flock along the same paths hikers use, a reminder that this landscape is still a working one, not a preserved diorama. Ask before photographing people or their homes; the Svans have a long-standing wariness of outsiders that predates tourism by centuries, and it’s worth respecting rather than testing.