The seafront
Walk along the seafront, and you'll pass restaurants, cafes, and clubs competing for space with shops selling fashionable clothes, jewellery and electronic goods. There are well-stocked food shops and no shortage of banks where you can change your money. The less formal economy is thriving too, and the bustle and colour of Yalta's markets are not to be missed.
In the evening during the high season the seafront is alive with street musicians (some very good), knife-jugglers, fire-eaters, caricaturists and artists. You can have yourself photographed in 18th century costume or on the back of a Harley Davidson, or with a live snake coiled round your shoulders. Walking along the promenade in the evening in the early 21st century is as much a matter of seeing and being seen as it was in the 19th, when the promenaders quizzed eachother discreetly through lorgnettes. Only now they're wearing Gucci shades, comparing tans and trying to work out if that designer label's genuine or not...
Beaches
During the day in summer people throng to the beaches or go sightseeing. Yalta has three clean pebble beaches, a small one in the harbour and two long ones, one at each end of the seafront. The public sections tend to be crowded in July and August, (this photo was taken in the morning when people were just arriving) but for about £3 you can get a day pass onto one of the private sections where there's more space.
Or you can combine sightseeing and beach and go for a swim at one of the other beaches further along the coast. For example, there's a nice little beach under the cliffs below the Livadia Palace. The summer home of the last of the Russian Tsars, Nikolai II, and in 1945 home to the Yalta Conference, where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met to re-draw the map of europe at the end of the war - the Livadia Palace breathes the history of the last 150 years.
The palace buildings and extensive gardens overlooking the sea and the bay of Yalta reflect the influence of the original architect, Ippolito Antonovich Monighetti, who was sent from Moscow to Livadia after the estate was bought for Tsar Alexander II in 1861.
Or get a boat from the pier in Yalta to the Swallow's Nest, a fairy-tale fantasy built on a rocky point above the sea and have a swim from the beach near there. In September, once the children are back at school, there's lots of room on all the beaches and you can get a tan, and swim in the sea, right up to the end of October.
The parks and the coast
In spite of the summer heat , Yalta is a green town with lots of trees and a beautiful seafront park . If you want somewhere a bit cooler, for a quiet chat or perhaps an hour with a book, you'll find it in the park, and there are a couple of little cafes among the trees where you can get a welcome drink. Or a short ride away are the world famous botanical gardens at Nikita.
Established in1812 by order of Tsar Alexander I, the botanical gardens at Nikita are among the oldest in the country. Perched on a slope above the sea just a 10 minute minibus ride from Yalta, they are well worth a visit, beautifully but carefully laid out by botanist K.K.Steven so as not to disturb some of the original species. Here you can see a 1000 year old juniper and a 500 year old oak tree, both native to Crimea, as well as many of almost 15,000 species collected from all quarters of the globe.
Interestingly, this is one of the few places in Crimea where you can see olive trees. Apparently olive cultivation did not develop here, in contrast with the mediterranean countries, because the olive was designated as bourgeois and un-proletarian after the 1917 revolution. For some reason fig and almond trees were not labelled in the same way, so fresh home-grown figs and almonds are on sale everywhere in Crimea - but not olives. Specimens were, however, allowed in the botanical gardens!
The Nikitsky gardens are a perfect place to meditate and put the finishing touches to your personal philosphy of life, the universe and just about everything. They stay open late in the evenings in summer, and a stroll in the gardens after a hot day on the beach or sightseeing is a pretty good way to unwind. There's a restaurant and fruit-tasting too.
As well as being a place of beauty and peace, the gardens have a practical side - half of the peaches and apricots grown in Ukraine are from varieties selected from the Nikitsky garden's huge collection, and seeds are also exported to Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria. The gardens' Scientific Centre exchanges seeds and information with 600 institutions worldwide.
You can walk for miles along the south coast from Yalta. The Sunlit Path (Solnechnaya Tropa) runs west from the Livadia Palace with spectacular views from the cliffs. And why not stop off at Miskhor and get the cable-car up to the top of Mount Ai-Petri, with fantastic views of the Black Sea and the mountains.
Mountains
At 1,234m, Ai-Petri is not the highest mountain in Crimea - that honour belongs to Roman Kosh (1,545m) between Gursuf and Alushta, north-east of Yalta. But it's certainly one of the most spectacular, with its sparkling white limestone peak and its jagged `teeth'. The peak is actually the weathered remains of a huge coral reef formed millions of years ago, when this area was under the sea, and although the limestone here is exceptionally dense - hence its longevity - fossils have been found in the rocks.
In the 6th century BC greek settlers in the area called it the Mountain of the Ram, suggesting that they saw the mountain's pointed summit as horns. Its later name, Ai-Petri, is also greek, meaning `sacred Peter' or `sacred rock', and derives from the christian monastery which stood on the plateau behind the peak until it was destroyed in the middle ages.
From the village of Miskhor near the Alupka Palace, you can take one of the longest cable-car rides in europe (3.5 km - in two legs) to get to the peak. The route takes you above vineyards and then forest, and finally up the steep rocky side of the mountain, with spectacular views of the Black Sea coast as you go up.
Alternatively, you can take a minibus or taxi up the winding forest road that leads to the plateau behind the summit, taking in panoramic glimpses of Yalta and the sea, and then stopping off at the Uchan-Su waterfall (98m) on the way. Or you can do the climb on foot with a guide who knows the safe way up.
There's a tiny Tatar hamlet on the plateau, where the people make a living selling food and drink and offering guided pony-rides further into the mountains. If you're lucky you might see a Tatar horseman galloping bareback - as steady as if he was sitting in a saddle with stirrups.
From the summit a narrow road snakes across the plateau and then down to the Great Canyon. Up to 350m deep and no more than 3m wide at its narrowest, the Canyon is thickly wooded and part of a series of conservation areas covering most of the coastal range of mountains. You can walk along the floor of the Canyon or along one of the higher paths along the sides. It's worth making a detour to the famous `Vanna Molodosty' (Bath of Youth), named by the Tatar Khan who used to make regular trips to it because he claimed it rejuvenated him. The `bath' is a 3m deep `kettle' in the rocks, fed by a clear mountain spring. After a hot hike through the woods the water feels colder than it actually is (about 8 degrees C) but boy, is it refreshing!
Chekhov's house
And then of course, there's Anton Chekhov's house... After his death in Germany in 1904, the house passed to Anton's sister Masha who resolved to keep it as far as possible exactly as it had been when Chekhov had lived there. After the revolution it was adopted by the Soviet government as a dom-musei (house-museum) . Set in a beautiful garden laid out by Chekhov himself, the house is surprisingly modern-looking from the garden side, with a sweeping arch over the main door. Inside, the rooms still contain Chekhov's turn-of-the-century furniture, the piano which Rachmaninov played and, on the wall, an antique Ericsson telephone. Chekhov's leather coat hangs with other clothes in a cupboard, a reminder of how tall he was - all of 1.86m (6' 1"). Opposite is a newer building which houses an extensive archive of photographs, theatre programmes, first editions and also Chekhov's medical books and equipment.
The Massandra Palace
The Massandra Palace stands in beautiful parkland on the outskirts of Yalta. It was designed by French architect Bouchart to emulate the style of some of the castles of the Loire valley. Originally built for Prince C.M.Vorontsov, it was acquired by Tsar Alexander III as his summer palace in 1889. After the 1917 revolution it was used as a holiday residence by high-ranking members of the Politburo - Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev all stayed here at one time or another.
In the early nineties the palace was designated a museum and opened to the public. The interior has now been beautifully restored. It contains a significant collection of fine art and period furniture in rooms set out to reflect the grandeur of its original nineteenth century owners.
And Yalta's nightlife... And the cable car to the top of Darsan Hill runs till 11pm - a cable-car for two, gently swaying up the hill in the darkness with Yalta beneath you and the lights of the ships out on the Black Sea - magic...
