Borjomi Guide: Spa Town, Mineral Water and the National Park

From Tbilisi

165 km

Altitude

794 m

Park entry

5 GEL

Sulphur pools

15 GEL

Every Georgian knows Borjomi, and most of them mean the water. The town it comes from, population 11,173 at the 2024 census, sits where the Borjomula stream meets the Mtkvari in a steep, forested gorge on the edge of Samtskhe-Javakheti, and it has been a resort since the Russian viceroys of the 1830s and 1840s came for the cure. The Romanovs took it over in 1871, built a park, a palace and a bottling plant, and the Soviet Union kept it as a union resort with sanatoria on every terrace. What is left is faded and pleasant: wooden villas, mosaics, a park full of families filling bottles, and a national park behind it that is the real reason to stay two nights. The facts below were checked on 28 September 2026 against wander-lush's Borjomi and transport guides (both updated in 2026), the Agency of Protected Areas' tariff and trail pages, Wikipedia, Booking.com, gotrip.ge and our own Bakuriani, trains and Samtskhe-Javakheti pages, all verified this month.

Is Borjomi worth it

It depends on what you want from the day. Borjomi is not a Kazbegi or a Svaneti; nothing here will stop you in your tracks. It is where Georgians go to slow down, and after a week of Tbilisi it does the same for visitors: cooler air, a river to walk beside, a warm pool in the forest, a guesthouse dinner and an early night. The town is walkable end to end in fifteen minutes. If you are already heading south to Rabati and Vardzia it is the natural first stop; if you have one spare day from Tbilisi, Mtskheta or Uplistsikhe give more for the road time.

Central Park and the spring

The Central Park, officially the Mineral Water Park, is a strip of gardens running up the Borjomula gorge from the middle of town, and it is where everyone starts. The gate on Baratashvili Street opens at 06:00 and closes at 20:00; entry is 5 GEL, free before 09:00 and free for children under eight. Inside are the old arbours, a children's fairground, cafes, a waterfall with a Prometheus statue, and a 1975 mosaic wall by Zurab Tsereteli at the Mozaika cafe.

Two hundred metres in, under a turquoise glass pavilion, is Ekaterina's spring, the original Borjomi source, named after the daughter of Yevgeni Golovin, the Tsar's viceroy in the Caucasus, who came for the cure in 1841. The water runs warm, salty and faintly sulphurous, nothing like the bottled version, and it is free: fill a bottle and drink it there, because it goes flat within hours. The grand stone building on your left as you enter is the first industrial bottling plant, opened by Grand Duke Mikhail in 1894; its entrance hall holds a four-spouted marble fountain and a small photo exhibition, and the rest is a chess club, a library and a concert hall.

The sulphur pools

Walk the whole park, about 850 m, past the fairground to where the paving turns to dirt, and keep going along the river: bridges, painted trail flags, and 3 km in all to the pools the Romanovs first arranged in the 19th century and the town rebuilt in the mid-2000s. Allow 30 to 45 minutes each way and two hours for the return trip with a swim. Three open-air pools sit beside the river in the trees, fed by a hydrogen-sulphide spring at a steady 30 to 32 C, which is milder than the baths in Tbilisi and pleasant in every season, including snow. Entry is 15 GEL, free under eight, 06:00 to 20:00 all year, with changing rooms and showers. Jeeps wait at the park to drive people up for around 300 GEL; walk unless you cannot.

The town

Baratashvili Street, which leads to the park, carries the best of the architecture: wooden cottages, Romanov-era dachas and, at the park gate, Firuza, a two-storey house of balconies and turquoise fretwork built in 1892 by the Iranian consul Mirza Reza Khan, with Persian inscriptions on the facade and mirror-work on the top balcony. It is now the Golden Tulip hotel; the courtyard cafe is open to anyone. Across the river the Borjomi Museum of Local Lore, founded in 1938 in the pseudo-Gothic Romanov chancellery, is the place to see the Likani palace's furniture and china and a good exhibition of old Borjomi bottles and labels (5 GEL, 10:00 to 18:00 April to October, an hour earlier in winter). The town is also good for Soviet mosaics: Tanguli Ortoidze's Sunrise at Tkhra-Tskaro near the bus station and the decorative walls by the Bridge of Beauty, a modern footbridge over the Mtkvari. For a view, climb to the Gogia fortress on the ridge directly above the museum, the nearest of the three medieval towers that watched the gorge.

Likani and the Kukushka: still closed

Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park

The park is the reason to stay a second night. Founded in 1995 with the WWF and the German government and opened in 2001, it covers about 85,000 hectares of spruce, pine and beech forest and high meadow stretching west to Kharagauli, with twelve marked trails, a network of basic tourist shelters and designated campsites, and about 800 red deer. The highest point is Sametskhvario at 2,642 m. Registration at the visitor centre, 23 Meskheti Street in Borjomi, is compulsory for every trail and free; bring your passport, and do it the afternoon before an early start. Most trailheads are within 30 km of town, at Likani (3.5 km south) and Atskuri (about 26 km south), so a taxi or your own car is part of the plan.

Getting there

Borjomi is 165 km from Tbilisi by the main highway west past Gori to Khashuri and then south up the Mtkvari; the road is flat and unremarkable until the gorge, and every option takes it. Vans leave from the Nige bus station inside Didube; the local train is the cheapest ride in the country and the slowest; a GoTrip driver turns the transfer into a day with stops.

Vans back to Tbilisi leave Borjomi bus station roughly hourly from 08:00 to about 18:30; arrive half an hour early for a seat. The local train stops at Borjomi-Parki, the small station by the park, arriving at 10:22 and 22:30 and leaving for Tbilisi at 06:00 and 16:30; it has hard seats, no air conditioning and cannot be booked online.

Where to stay

Borjomi has more hotels than anywhere else in the south, from family guesthouses at 40 GEL to the Crowne Plaza by the park gate, and the Golden Tulip in the Firuza house if you want to sleep inside the architecture. Guesthouses are the right answer for most people: breakfast is included, dinner can be added, and the hosts know the trails. Two things to know about prices. Saturdays cost more than weekdays at every level, and the Crowne Plaza most of all: it was 119 GEL for a Thursday night in October when we read it on 20 September and 414 GEL for the Saturday when we read it again on 28 September. And Booking.com's Borjomi search puts the plateau hotels, 3 km up the hill, in the same list as the town; check the map before you book if you are on foot.

Where to eat

The best meals in Borjomi are cooked by guesthouse hosts, and if yours offers dinner, take it: 20 to 30 GEL a head for a table of whatever the family is eating, with their wine. In town, Cafe Iggy on Kostava Square, opened in 2022 in one of the heritage buildings, is the one restaurant worth planning a meal around, and Pesvebi is the dependable Georgian kitchen with a terrace. The courtyard cafe at the Golden Tulip does coffee in the prettiest setting in town. Two local things to buy: pine-cone jam, made from the young green cones and sold in jars at the park and the bazaar, and kevi, the natural chewing gum made from pine resin. Restaurants inside the park are for a drink between the spring and the pools, not for dinner.

Season

October is the month. The gorge is mostly deciduous, the colour runs from mid-October into November, the summer crowds are gone and the pools feel better in cool air. Spring arrives early here, so the lower national park trails open while the high mountains are still under snow, though May and June can be very wet. July and August are busy, with weekend traffic in the centre and full pools; go midweek if you must go then. Winter is quiet and pretty, the pools steam in the snow, the park rents snowshoes from 15 GEL, and Bakuriani's lifts, 30 km up the hill, ran from 20 December to 29 March last season.

What it costs

Two people sharing a guesthouse and eating one restaurant dinner spend about 120 to 170 GEL each (about $46 to $65) for the overnight; the same trip at the Crowne Plaza on a Saturday is a different number. USD at the National Bank of Georgia rate published 26 September 2026, 1 USD = 2.61 GEL. Our budget guide has the country-wide figures.

Day trip or overnight

A day trip works on paper: the 08:00 van arrives about 10:30, the last comfortable van back is around 18:00, and that is enough for the park, the spring, the pools and lunch. It is a lot of road for it. One night is the right length. Arrive by midday, do the park and walk to the pools in the afternoon, eat at the guesthouse, and next morning register at the visitor centre and walk the Information Trail or take a taxi to Likani for the valley loop before an afternoon van home or the 3 GEL van up to Bakuriani. Two nights if you want the Footprint trail or a day in Bakuriani's meadows. On a longer southern loop, give Borjomi one night on the way down and sleep the second in Akhaltsikhe, which is the better base for Vardzia.

Nearby

Our Samtskhe-Javakheti road trip strings all four together over three to five days, with the road bans a rental car needs to know about.

Mistakes people make

• Coming for the day. Five hours of van for four in town. Stay the night; the morning trail is the best part.
• A summer Saturday. Midweek, or October, is a different town.
• Planning around Likani or the Kukushka. Both closed. Every search result still lists them.
• Skipping the national park. The pools are the postcard; the forest is the point. Even the 3 km Information Trail counts.
• No swimsuit, no towel. Nowhere handy sells either.
• Paying 300 GEL for the jeep to the pools. It is a flat 3 km walk by the river.
• Booking the plateau by mistake. Hotels up the cable car are 3 km from the park gate by road. Check the map.
• Turning up at a trailhead unregistered. The visitor centre in town first, with your passport.

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