Sochi

Sochi National Park was established in 1983 in Krasnodar krai and was, alongside Losiny Ostrov, one of the first two national parks created in Russia. It occupies some 1,900 km² on the southern slope of the western Caucasus, between the Black Sea coast and the main divide of the range.

The difference in height is enormous and very compressed: from sea level to more than three thousand metres within a few kilometres. That allows a complete succession of vegetation belts, with the particularity that the lower levels preserve Colchic forests of humid subtropical type, a relict ecosystem from the Tertiary that survived the glaciations in the refuge of Colchis and that includes evergreen species, lianas and ferns uncommon in Europe. Above them come beech forests, fir forests, subalpine meadows and rocky ground.

The park is riddled with caves and karst canyons, and fast rivers with waterfalls run through it. It is also the setting for the programme to restore the Caucasian leopard, extinct in the region by the middle of the twentieth century, with a breeding and release centre created in 2009. Hosting the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 placed considerable pressure on the park and its surroundings, with infrastructure works in areas close to the Western Caucasus World Heritage property that were the subject of international monitoring.