Tskaltubo, Georgia: Abandoned Soviet Sanatoriums, Spa Baths and Prometheus Cave

Most people from the West who come to Georgia come for the wine, the food and the mountains. I came for an abandoned Soviet resort.

Tskaltubo was built as a spa town for Soviet workers, with marble sanatoriums that look like palaces. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the new Georgian state had no money to keep it running, and most of it was left to rot.

In one of the sanatoriums I walked into, I heard heavy steps on the ground floor. It turned out to be cows and pigs wandering through what used to be the lobby.

Upstairs was a huge ballroom, a former cinema and decoration I did not expect in a ruin. That luxury was the point: it told workers they now had what only the aristocracy could afford before the Revolution.

Some buildings are still home to families who fled the war in Abkhazia in the 1990s, and in one of them residents charged me a small fee to go in. The makeshift homes and sheds built into the old wings reminded me of Fallout or Metro 2033.

In a restored building nearby I found Stalin painted among workers and teachers. And yes, Soviet spa towns had a reputation for holiday romances, something Russians still call a kurortny roman.

Tskaltubo's warm springs were declared a resort in 1920, and construction started in 1926. The town was planned around a central park, and many of the grandest sanatoriums went up in the 1950s in Stalinist neoclassical style.

At its peak it had about 20 sanatoriums and nine bathhouses, fed by radon water at 33 to 35 C. Patients came from across the Soviet Union, including on a direct train from Moscow.

After 1991 the guests stopped coming. From 1993 the empty sanatoriums housed thousands of people displaced by the war in Abkhazia, and most of them were only moved to new apartments in 2021 to 2023.

Since 2022 the government has been auctioning the sanatoriums to investors under its New Life of Tskaltubo program. Medea and Tbilisi have been sold, but as of mid-2025 more than half of the buildings on offer still had no buyer.

There are around 20 buildings, and you can see the best of them in half a day on foot. These are the ones I would not skip.

Nothing stops you from walking in, which is exactly why you need to be careful. These buildings are decaying, and some of them are still people's homes.

The town wraps around a central park of about 70 to 80 hectares, roughly a quarter of the size of New York's Central Park. The bathhouses sit inside it, among old cedars and paths where patients once walked between treatments.

Two bathhouses still work: Spring No. 1 and Spring No. 6, open daily from 10:00 to 17:00. A one-off bath in a private cabin at No. 6 costs 25 GEL, the shared pool at No. 1 costs 20 GEL, and both are cheaper if you book a treatment course.

The restored Legends Tskaltubo Spa Resort, a former military sanatorium, runs tours of its concert hall, museum and Stalin's room for about 20 GEL.

Tskaltubo is about 15 km by road from Kutaisi, a 20 to 25 minute ride. Kutaisi has the nearest airport and rail links, so most people come for the day from there.

Prometheus Cave and the Sataplia reserve are both a short drive from the town, so they fit into the same day as the sanatoriums. My order: the cave in the morning, the ruins after lunch, a bath at No. 6 before it closes at 17:00.

Georgia is outside the EU, so EU roaming deals do not apply, and roaming from the UK, the US or the Gulf is billed at international rates. In Tskaltubo you need data for Bolt, maps and getting a ride back.

A Georgia eSIM installed before you fly connects as soon as you land in Kutaisi. eSIMPal's Georgia plans run on Magti and Silknet, and Magti covers about 99% of the populated country.