The peninsula's most famous point is Cape Tarkhankut, its southwestern tip, and the whitewashed Tarkhankut Lighthouse that stands watch there. It sits at the western edge of Crimea, near Cape Prybiynyi, the peninsula's true westernmost point, a place where the coastline finally exhausts itself against the open Black Sea. For sailors, the light has long marked the edge of the land, a fixed point in an expanse of water that stretches uninterrupted toward the horizon. The cape gathers everything that makes the peninsula distinctive into a single dramatic promontory: the pale limestone, the constant wind, the sense of standing at the very margin of the map. It is the kind of place people travel to precisely because there is nothing beyond it, only sea and sky meeting somewhere far out of reach.

The Tarkhankut Highlands are not mountains so much as a raised, sun-bleached tableland, a low upland of pale stone and thin steppe grass that tilts gradually toward the coast before breaking off in cliffs. Rain is scarce here, and the land shows it: parched in high summer, the color of bone and straw. The northern shore forms the southern edge of Karkinit Bay, a broad, shallow arm of the Black Sea. To the south lies Donuzlav, a long, narrow salt lake linked to the sea by a ship channel cut through the land. Wind farms turn near its shores, their blades wheeling in the constant coastal air, harvesting the one resource this exposed peninsula has in endless supply. It is a landscape stripped to essentials, treeless and open to the sky, and much of its beauty comes from that very austerity, from the clean lines of stone meeting water with nothing in between.

What draws people to Tarkhankut is not the land at all but what lies beneath its cliffs. The water off this coast is famously transparent, and the limestone has been sculpted by the sea into arches, tunnels, and underwater galleries. Snorkelers and divers explore grottoes where sunlight filters down through impossibly blue water and the rock opens into hidden chambers. Along the shore, waves have carved the soft stone into natural bridges and pillars, so that the coastline reads like a ruin built by no one. For a peninsula this dry and quiet above the waterline, the sea holds an unexpected abundance of texture and light.

Tarkhankut's position at the western extremity of Crimea has always given it strategic weight, and in recent years that geography has drawn the pressures of the wider Russo-Ukrainian War onto its quiet cliffs. Military installations were placed here, including a radio-engineering regiment and, for a time, an S-400 air-defense missile system positioned to watch the sea and sky. On August 23, 2023, that missile site was reported destroyed in a Ukrainian strike. The peninsula's stark beauty and its usefulness as a lookout have never been separable, and the same wind-scoured emptiness that appeals to divers and photographers has long recommended it to those who need to see a long way in every direction.