Dzharylhatskyi

Dzharylhach is what the Dnipro's sand becomes once the Black Sea's currents have had a few thousand years to arrange it: a 42-kilometre crescent of shell-sand swept along the Kherson coast and piled into the largest island in the Black Sea. It encloses the shallow, warm Dzharylhach Bay against the mainland, and at its western end it thins to a bare spit reaching for the resort village of Lazurne — a tether that storms cut and the sea quietly rebuilds, so the island spends stretches of its life as a peninsula. The national park, declared in 2009, covers the whole of it plus a band of the bay: ten thousand hectares of dune, brine and knee-deep water, with the little port town of Skadovsk as its gateway on the opposite shore.

The island itself is sand steppe threaded with salt lakes and freshened by artesian wells sunk in the early twentieth century, which still flow into pools that keep the wildlife watered. Botanists count some five hundred vascular plants here, several dozen of them endemics of these coastal sands. The big animals are a game-management inheritance: red deer and mouflon released in the Soviet decades went feral, and by the 2010s several hundred head grazed the open flats — an incongruous, almost savanna-like sight between two horizons of water and grass. At the far end stand the island's two lighthouses: the openwork iron tower assembled in 1902, which local lore attributes to Gustave Eiffel's workshop, and the concrete successor raised beside it in 1997.

Before 2022 all of this ran on Skadovsk's small-boat summer: excursion launches across the bay, day-trippers wading the shallows, tents and campfire ash at the western tip. Since March 2022 the town and the island have been under Russian occupation. What has filtered out since is grim: fires in June and August 2023 burned around 1,600 hectares of the island's vegetation, a military training ground has been reported on park land, and Ukrainian prosecutors have assessed the environmental damage at over a hundred billion hryvnias. What is left of the deer and mouflon herds cannot be verified.

What's worth knowing before you go

You can't. Dzharylhach and its mainland gateways — Skadovsk, Lazurne — have been occupied since 2022, there is no lawful or safe way in, and the park's staff work displaced, monitoring their island through satellite imagery and second-hand reports. Before the invasion the crossing was a forty-minute launch from Skadovsk pier; the island had no permanent residents, no shops and almost no shade, and the standard advice was to carry water and watch the wind forecast. That knowledge will matter again when the island comes back; for now the honest guidance is that this page describes a place under military occupation, not a destination.