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Tuzla

Tuzla is not a town but a razor-thin finger of sand reaching out from the Taman shore into the Kerch Strait — a sandy spit, classed as a peninsula, that closes the gap between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea and forms the westernmost point of Krasnodar Krai. Barely a few hundred metres wide and some five kilometres long, it is one of the strangest and most quietly dramatic landscapes on Russia's southern coast: stand on the dam and you have two different seas on either side of you. Though it looks like a forgotten strip of beach, Tuzla has a real story. A storm in 1925 ripped an opening through its neck and created the separate Tuzla Island; Soviet marines fought to retake the spit from a German garrison in October 1943; a 2003 causeway sparked a border stand-off between Russia and Ukraine; and today the Crimean Bridge strides across it, binding the mainland to Crimea. For travellers it is a place of wide horizons, migrating sand, healing mud and a photogenic viewpoint — though access to the spit itself is currently restricted, so most come to look, not to sunbathe.