Travel warning: Crimea has been under Russian military occupation since 2014, in violation of international law, and has been a conflict zone since Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Most governments advise strongly against travel. The content below describes Crimea as a travel destination in earlier times.
Crimea is a 27,000 km² peninsula in the northern Black Sea, connected to mainland Ukraine by the narrow Isthmus of Perekop. The peninsula is sometimes called a "microcontinent" for its exceptional range of landscapes packed into a small area: steppes in the north, salt lakes around the Sivash marshes, and in the south, a narrow Mediterranean coast backed by the Crimean Mountains that rise to Roman-Kosh (1,545 m).
The southern coast — a 180 km strip from Sevastopol to Feodosia — is the classic destination: warm, dry, Mediterranean in climate, and lined with tsarist and Soviet-era sanatoriums. Yalta was the Romanovs' summer playground and still has the Livadia Palace where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin held the 1945 conference. Sevastopol, the port city on the western coast, covers the ancient Greek ruins of Chersonesus and the battlefields of the 1854–55 Crimean War. Bahchisaray, inland, was the capital of the Crimean Khanate and still holds the Khan's Palace.
Destinations in Crimea
Sevastopol Yalta Simferopol Sudak Bahchisaray Karadag Chersones Simeiz
