Azerbaijan: Nine Attractions and Natural Wonders

Fire, oil, and the Caspian

Azerbaijan sits where the Caucasus mountains meet the Caspian Sea, on a peninsula so rich in oil and natural gas that flames have leaked from the ground and burned for centuries — which is why fire-worship took hold here and why the country calls itself the "Land of Fire." Its capital, Baku, pairs a UNESCO-listed walled old town with a skyline of oil-money towers.

The nine below concentrate around Baku, with two — Sheki and Lahij — in the greener Caucasus foothills a few hours northwest. Spring and autumn are the best seasons; Baku summers are hot and windy, winters raw.

1. The Old City of Baku (Icherisheher)

Baku's walled old town is a compact maze of honey-coloured stone: caravanserais, hammams, small mosques, and a medieval minaret from the 11th century. It has been inhabited for many centuries and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000, along with the two monuments it contains — the Maiden Tower and the Shirvanshahs' palace.

It is walkable in a couple of hours and pleasant to get lost in, with carpet shops, tea houses, and a surviving stretch of the fortress wall and gates.

2. The Maiden Tower

The Maiden Tower (Qız Qalası) is Baku's most famous and most enigmatic landmark: a stone cylinder of eight storeys, about 29.5 metres tall, with walls up to five metres thick and a strange buttress running up one side. Nobody is sure when it was built — much of it is generally dated to the 12th century, but some scholars argue for far older foundations — or whether it was a fortress, a fire temple, or an observatory.

A climb up the internal stairs leads to a rooftop view over the Old City and the bay. A small museum inside tells the story of the city, and many legends are attached to the name.

3. The Palace of the Shirvanshahs

On a hill inside the walls, this stone complex was the seat of the Shirvanshahs, the local dynasty that moved its capital to Baku in the 15th century. It is a set of linked courtyards and buildings — the palace proper, a mosque and minaret, the burial vaults, the remains of a bathhouse, and the "Divankhana" pavilion — all in the same pale, finely carved stone.

A museum-reserve since 1964, it works as an open-air museum of medieval Azerbaijani architecture, with finds from excavations on display.

4. The Flame Towers and the Baku seafront

The three Flame Towers, finished in 2012, are Baku's defining modern image: curved skyscrapers up to 182 metres tall, covered in LED panels that turn the whole city block into an animated bonfire after dark. They hold a hotel, offices, and apartments, and the terrace below is the standard photo spot.

At their foot, the Baku Boulevard runs for kilometres along the Caspian — landscaped gardens, the Azerbaijan Carpet Museum, and the funicular up to Martyrs' Lane below the towers.

5. Gobustan rock art and mud volcanoes

About an hour southwest of Baku, the Gobustan reserve protects more than 6,000 rock carvings — dancers, hunters, reed boats, bulls, and nearby a much-discussed Roman Latin inscription — carved into the rock between about 20,000 and 5,000 years ago. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007, with a petroglyph museum on site.

A road beyond leads to a field of mud volcanoes: dozens of cold, grey cones that bubble, gurgle, and occasionally belch — about 300 of the world's roughly 700 mud volcanoes are in Gobustan and the Caspian Sea.

6. Yanar Dag

On the Absheron peninsula north of Baku, flames up to three metres high burn continuously along the foot of a low hill, fed by natural gas escaping through the porous sandstone. Some local accounts say it was ignited by a shepherd in the 1950s, others that it has burned far longer; medieval travellers, including Marco Polo, wrote about the region's eternal fires.

It is a short visit — a fire, a viewing terrace, a small museum — and is usually combined with the Ateshgah fire temple nearby. The flames show best at dusk.

7. The Ateshgah Fire Temple

At Surakhani, on the eastern edge of Baku, a pentagonal walled compound surrounds a central domed altar over what was once a natural gas vent. The site has ancient roots as a place of fire worship; the present buildings were raised in the 17th and 18th centuries largely by Indian traders and ascetics who lived in the cells around the courtyard.

The natural flame went out in 1969 after nearly a century of oil and gas extraction in the area; the flame is now piped from the city mains. Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Punjabi and Persian, dated between 1668 and 1816, are set into the walls.

8. Sheki and the Khan's Palace

Sheki, in the wooded foothills of the Greater Caucasus, was a silk-road town and the seat of a khanate declared in 1743. Its Khan's Palace is small but astonishing: every surface painted with flowers, hunting scenes, and battles, and the windows filled with shebeke, jigsaws of coloured glass and carved wood assembled without a single nail.

The old town around it — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2019 — has two surviving 18th-century caravanserais, a few artisans still making the lattice windows, and its own local halva.

9. Lahij

On the southern slopes of the Greater Caucasus, off the Baku–Sheki road, Lahij is a stone village famous for metalwork: for centuries its coppersmiths made copperware and arms, and traditional copper workshops still operate. The village has cobbled streets, an old river-stone sewerage system, and its own language: most people speak Tat, a Southwestern Iranian language.

Most people visit on a day trip from Baku or as a stop on the way to Sheki.

Azerbaijan is easy to travel: Baku and the Absheron peninsula cover most of this list in two or three days, and a car or driver reaches Sheki and Lahij in an afternoon each.