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Batumi has been ruled by Ancient Greeks, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Imperial Russia, briefly by the British (1918 to 1920), the Soviets, and now Georgia since independence in 1991. That succession of rulers has left an architectural palimpsest that is strange and compelling: Ottoman mosques stand next to Russian Orthodox churches and Soviet modernist housing blocks, while glass casino towers and a 130-meter Alphabet Tower inscribed with the Georgian script have been added in the post-independence development boom that turned Batumi into the Caucasus region's most ambitious resort project.

The seafront Batumi Boulevard, a four-kilometer pedestrian promenade, anchors the city's beach resort identity.

The subtropical climate on this corner of the Black Sea supports tea and citrus cultivation in the surrounding Adjara region, and the Batumi Botanical Garden, founded in 1912 on a cape north of the city, holds one of the more extraordinary collections of subtropical plants in Europe, arranged across a hillside with sea views. At the mouth of the Chorokhi River, 15 kilometers south of the city, the Gonio Fortress preserves a 1st-century Roman fortification that some historians associate with Apsaros, a stop on Jason and the Argonauts' legendary route.