How to travel to Abkhazia (Tips + 6-day itinerary)

Update 2025: The border between Georgia and Abkhazia has been closed since 2020. Today, you can only visit Abkhazia from Russia, for which you’ll need a double-entry visa. Read our Russian visa guide for more information.

I was in no man’s land, walking the couple of kilometers that separate Georgia from Abkhazia, still thinking about the last thing that the Georgian officer told me:

Don’t trust Abkhazians – He said after handing my passport back.

It wasn’t the first time I had crossed a non-friendly border but this was the first time I heard an immigration officer saying something like that.

I was getting closer to the Abkhazian border and, as soon as I arrived and said hello to everybody with a big smile, the Abkhazian officer told me:

This bottle of water is not allowed here. Remove the label. 

Yes, in effect, my water had a label written in Georgian, and Georgian-related things are not allowed in Abkhazia.

Shit… That was pretty intense.

Things were about to get very interesting and I couldn’t be more excited to be there.

Welcome to the unrecognized Republic of Abkhazia.

This guide contains everything you need to know to travel to Abkhazia, including tips and a 6-day itinerary

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Introduction to visiting the Republic of Abkhazia

Important – Before you read, please note that I don’t intend to get into politics. Seriously, I am not on any side but I am just a traveler who wants to show the beauty of Abkhazia in the same way that I have been showing other places in Georgia. It is not my business to claim whether Abkhazia is a republic or not and if I say it, it is because this is how Abkhazians say it, not because I care about it. I just want to show the world what my eyes saw from a traveling perspective.

In 1992, after the Soviet Union’s dissolution,  Georgia was planning to abolish the Soviet-era constitution and restoring the 1921 Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

As a…