The park protects a stretch of the Tarkhankut Peninsula where the semi-arid mountain steppe descends to a rugged, rocky coast. This is a land of extremes. The climate swings hard between seasons, with hot summers and a long dry stretch from late May to mid-September. Park managers count some 2,350 hours of sunshine a year against just 316 millimeters of rain, numbers that explain the bleached, sculpted character of the terrain. Summer bakes the grasslands gold; the sea below stays a startling blue. Where the two meet, cliffs and gorges break the horizon, and a gorge at Bolshoy Castel runs all the way down to a beach, past the ruins of settlements long since abandoned to the wind.

What makes this place scientifically precious is what it preserves. The gullies of the Castel sectors shelter some of the last primeval coastal steppe on the Black Sea, ground that was never plowed under or grazed to bareness. More than 400 species of vascular plants have been recorded within the park, including the fifty specialists found nowhere else nearby. Coastal steppe, shrub-steppe, and open shrubland weave together across the three protected sections, each a slightly different variation on survival in a place with too much sun and too little water. These are not showy landscapes; their richness is in the detail, in the specialized plants that learned to live where few others could. To walk here is to see, in miniature, what the vast Eurasian steppe looked like before the plow rewrote it, a glimpse of an older, wilder version of the land that once rolled unbroken for thousands of miles.

The park is not a single continuous expanse but three separate sections strung along the western Crimean shore, each protecting a different fragment of the same threatened landscape. Together they hold a mosaic of habitats where the dry mountain steppe gives way to a rugged, rocky coast. At Bolshoy Castel, a gorge runs down to a beach past the ruins of former settlements, a reminder that people once lived and worked this hard ground before the land was set aside for protection. That mix of the wild and the abandoned gives the park a haunting quality. Nature is reclaiming what human settlement gave up on, and in the quiet gullies the old steppe persists in ground that agriculture never managed to tame. It is a place defined as much by what people left behind as by what still grows there.

The park is organized into four zones, from strictly protected ground to areas set aside for recreation and modest local use. Visitors will find heated cabins for rent, boats, fishing, and campsites tucked among the main sections, so that a stay here can be genuinely comfortable despite the wild surroundings. But access to the most fragile ground comes with rules. The administration asks that guests check in at the visitor center to register and review the regulations, and hiking the ecological trails through the protected zones requires an escort by park staff. It is a deliberate arrangement, meant to let people experience a rare landscape without loving it to death.