Tuzlovski lymany
A chain of salt lagoons behind a thin sand bar on the Budzhak coast — spawning ground for Black Sea fish, a stranding site for dolphins, and where flamingos nested in Ukraine for the first time, in the middle of the war.
Tuzlovski lymany — the Tuzly Lagoons — is the string of salt lagoons that runs along the Budzhak coast between the Dniester and the Danube, in the far southwest corner of Ukraine. A sand bar twenty-nine kilometres long and often only a couple of hundred metres wide separates them from the Black Sea, so that the whole system is a line of shallow, hypersaline basins held apart from the open water by a ribbon of dune. Declared a national park in 2010 on a wetland that had been Ramsar-listed since 1996, it covers around 28,000 hectares built around three big lagoons — Shahany, Alibei and Burnas — with a scatter of smaller ones, Solone, Khadzhyder and Karachaus among them. The water is shallow, a metre or so deep, and its salinity swings with the seasons from brackish to saltier than the sea.
Conservationists call the lagoons the maternity ward of the Black Sea's fish: the reed margins and salt flats are spawning and nursery grounds, and the whole system is a migration bottleneck on the flyway down the coast. Hundreds of bird species pass through or breed here — swans, cranes, waders and terns on the bars — and the park's field station on the coast has become a centre for research on the northern Black Sea's cetaceans, recording and investigating the dolphin strandings that wash up along the bar. The single most remarkable event of recent years was botanical only in the sense of being unheralded: in 2023, greater flamingos built some 250 nests on the shore of Burnas near Bazarianka and raised around 190 chicks — the first time the species had ever bred in Ukraine, and it happened in a war zone.
The bar itself is a fragile thing, periodically breached and re-closed, and the park's central management fight has been over keeping the sea connection working, controlling the vehicles that once churned the dunes, and stopping the poaching that a thinly-watched coast invites. The villages behind the lagoons — Tuzly, Zhovtyi Yar, Bazarianka, Lebedivka — are small Bessarabian settlements of the Budzhak steppe, a patchwork region of Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Moldovan and Gagauz communities south of the Danube road.
What's worth knowing before you go
The park headquarters and research base sit near Tatarbunary, inland from the lagoons, and in peacetime the draw was the bar itself — the walk along the dune ribbon between lagoon and sea, the bird hides, and the field station's work on the flamingos and dolphins, all arranged through the administration.
The war has changed the terms. This is the Odesa-region Black Sea coast, where beaches and shoreline are mined and access to the sea edge is militarily restricted; the flamingos raised their chicks against a backdrop of restricted, dangerous coast rather than an open one. The park continues to operate and monitor its birds and strandings, but the sand bar and the seaward shore are not a place to wander independently, and any visit depends entirely on current security guidance rather than on the migration calendar.