Sataplia Nature Reserve

Sataplia Nature Reserve tickets and tours: which one to book

Sataplia is a small hilltop reserve of forest, caves and dinosaur footprints about ten kilometres, twenty minutes by road, north-west of Kutaisi, the chief city of western Georgia, which has an international airport used by low-cost airlines and is three and a half to four hours from Tbilisi and two from Batumi. It is one of the two show caves that every visitor to Kutaisi is taken to, the other being the much larger Prometheus cave, twenty kilometres away, and the day tours from the city invariably pair them, usually with the monasteries of Gelati and Motsameta, the Martvili canyon or the Okatse canyon. Without a tour, one takes a taxi or a ride-hailing car, since the minibus from the Kutaisi market is infrequent.

Tickets are bought at the visitor centre at the entrance, run by the national agency of protected areas, and the visit is made only with one of the reserve's guides, in groups that set off every twenty minutes or so as they fill, the tour being given in Georgian, Russian or English and lasting about an hour. It follows a paved circuit of a kilometre and a half: first into a pavilion built over the fossil footprints; then along a path through the forest, with life-size model dinosaurs that delight small children; then through the cave, on a level, lit walkway; and finally, up a flight of steps, to a viewing platform with a glass floor cantilevered out from the top of the hill, with a cafe beside it. The whole thing was rebuilt to modern standards in 2010 and 2011, is easy walking apart from the steps, and is suitable for almost anyone. Those who want more may continue on a forest trail beyond the platform.

Visiting Sataplia Nature Reserve: what you will see

Sataplia owes its existence to a schoolteacher and naturalist from Kutaisi, Petre Chabukiani, who in 1925 explored the cave on the hill and, in 1933, recognised for what they were the three-toed prints in a slab of limestone on its slope; the state reserve was declared in 1935, one of the oldest in Georgia, and covers about 350 hectares of Mount Sataplia, a hill of some five hundred metres, described as the remnant of an ancient volcano, whose name means the honey place, because wild bees nested in the crevices of its southern cliffs and the villagers collected the honey. The footprints, about two hundred of them, are preserved in two layers of Cretaceous limestone, laid down some hundred and twenty million years ago as the limy mud of a lagoon shore on the edge of the Tethys ocean. The lower layer bears the tracks of small and medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, theropods that walked on their hind legs, the upper one the larger, blunter prints of herbivores, which passed the same way some thousands of years afterwards, and the two together are rare in showing both kinds in one place; the pavilion over them is kept at a constant climate, and a walkway carries visitors above the slab.

The cave is a karst cave of modest size, about nine hundred metres long in all, of which some three hundred are shown, formed by an underground stream that still flows through it, at a constant temperature of about fourteen degrees and very high humidity, with stalactites, stalagmites, curtains and flowstone under coloured lighting, and at its centre a squat, rounded stalagmite, lit in red, which the guides call the stone heart and on which visitors are told to make a wish. The forest is the third element, and the least noticed: it is a well-preserved fragment of Colchic forest, the humid, warm-temperate woodland of the eastern Black Sea coast, which survived the ice ages as a refuge of species that died out elsewhere in Europe, with beech, hornbeam, chestnut, the Colchic box, which has been devastated across Georgia since 2010 by a blight and an introduced moth, yew, cherry laurel, Pontic rhododendron, holly, butcher's broom and ivy climbing to the crowns. From the glass platform the view extends over Kutaisi and the Rioni plain, the ancient Colchis of the Golden Fleece, to the wall of the Greater Caucasus.

Sataplia Nature Reserve: best time to go, seasons and hours

The reserve is open from 10 am to about 5.30 or 6 pm and is closed one day a week, usually Monday, as is Prometheus cave on a different or the same day, so the current schedule should be checked before going; it may also close in heavy rain. Since the cave is at the same temperature all year and the paths are paved, any season will do: May, June, September and October are the most pleasant, July and August are hot and humid outside and busy, with queues for the guided groups in the late morning, when the tour buses arrive, and winter is quiet, damp and mild.

Come at opening time or after three. A light jacket is useful in the cave, and the walkways are wet. Allow an hour and a half. Kutaisi, with the Bagrati cathedral and its market, is twenty minutes away, Gelati monastery half an hour, Prometheus cave forty minutes, and the Martvili and Okatse canyons an hour to an hour and a half.