The Russian Riviera on the Black Sea — the subtropical resort city wedged between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea coast, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics, where palm trees grow alongside ski lifts, subtropical humidity mingles with alpine snow, and Stalin vacationed in a dacha that still stands as a museum
Sochi is Russia's premier resort city — a city of 450,000 stretched for 145km along the Black Sea coast of the western Caucasus, in a subtropical microclimate where palm trees, eucalyptus, and tea plantations grow within sight of the 2,000-metre Caucasus peaks. Sochi hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics at a cost of $51 billion (the most expensive Olympics in history), creating a purpose-built Olympic Park at Adler on the coast and the Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort (2,320m) in the Caucasus mountains at Krasnaya Polyana — an hour's drive or express train journey from the beach. The contrast is uniquely…
The Sochi area was inhabited by the Ubykh, Abaza, and Shapsug peoples, who were expelled in the Russo-Circassian War (1817–1864) — the area's history of forced population removal is significant and contested. The Russian military established Fort Alexandriya on the site of modern Sochi in 1838. After the Circassian genocide and mass deportation of 1864, the area was resettled by Russians and Georgians. Sochi became a resort town in the late 19th century for Russian aristocracy, then a 'city of health' (Soviet sanatorium system) under Stalin — whose personal dacha (constructed 1936–37) became…