Upper Svaneti, Mountain region and heritage site in Mestia Municipality, Georgia

Upper Svaneti is a mountain region in the Enguri valley and its side valleys in the Greater Caucasus. Its villages contain medieval defensive towers up to five storeys high, roofed with slate slabs, and two-storey machubi houses where people and livestock shared the ground floor. Ushguli's Chazhashi hamlet, a 1.09 ha UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, holds about 200 historic buildings.

Chazhashi, the Ushguli hamlet of 1.09 ha, was protected as the Ushguli-Chazhashi Museum from 1971 and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996, with a 19.16 ha buffer zone covering the other hamlets and farmland. The medieval towers served as defence, granaries and temporary dwellings; their number also expressed the power of kinship groups.

The name Ushguli covers several hamlets, and only Chazhashi, with its 1.09 ha core, is the UNESCO World Heritage property; it was already protected as the Ushguli-Chazhashi Museum from 1971. Svan is still spoken here, and the machubi houses keep people and livestock under one roof in winter, with the upper darzabi floor linked to the tower.

Ushguli is usually visited on day trips from Mestia. The village community's highest point lies at 2,200 m, making it one of Europe's highest permanently inhabited settlements. Georgia's highest mountain, Shkhara (5,201 m), is visible from the village, and its glacier can be reached on foot or by horse in about three hours.

Of Ushguli's settlements, only Chazhashi, covering 1.09 ha, is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, protected since 1971 as the Ushguli-Chazhashi museum. The listing is surrounded by a 19.16 ha buffer zone that takes in the other hamlets and the farmed mountain landscape of dairy and beef cattle and potato growing.