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Capital: Baku
Population: 10.2 million+
Language: Azerbaijani
1 – Khinalig and the Caucasus Mountains (also above)
The Greater Caucasus forms Azerbaijan’s northern border with Russia, topping out at Bazardüzü (4,466 m), and up a winding mountain road from Quba sits Khinalig, a village of flat-roofed stone houses stacked so that each roof is the yard of the house above.
Base yourself in Quba or Qusar for Khinalig, the Shahdag Mountain Resort below Shahdag (4,243 m) and the village of Laza with its waterfalls, all in the high Caucasus.
Khinalig’s people speak Khinalug, a language with no close relatives, usually classed as a branch of its own within the Northeast Caucasian family and spoken by only a few thousand people, and in 2023 UNESCO listed Khinalig with the Köç Yolu, the roughly 200 km route its shepherds walk with their flocks between summer and winter pastures.
2 – Gobustan National Park
Gobustan National Park, about 60 km south-west of Baku, protects more than 6,000 rock carvings, which UNESCO says bear witness to some 40,000 years of rock art, and it was added to the World Heritage List in 2007.
Follow the marked paths from Gobustan’s museum to carvings of hunters, dancers, bulls and boats on the hills of Boyukdash, Kichikdash and Jingirdag, tap the gaval dash, a slab that rings like a tambourine, then go on to the nearby mud volcanoes, part of the several hundred in Azerbaijan, roughly a third of all those known on Earth.
Gobustan’s most surprising carving is Roman, an inscription cut under Emperor Domitian (AD 81–96) by Lucius Julius Maximus, a centurion of the Twelfth Legion “Fulminata”, and one of the easternmost Roman inscriptions ever found.
3 – Palace of the Shirvanshahs
The Palace of the Shirvanshahs crowns Baku’s Old City, seat of a dynasty that had moved its court here after an earthquake devastated Shamakhi in the late 12th century, and it was begun around 1411 under Ibrahim I and largely completed in the 1430s–40s by his son Khalilullah I.
The Palace of the Shirvanshahs spreads over courtyards on three levels, with the residence, the domed Divankhana, whose purpose is debated, the tomb Khalilullah built in 1435–36 for his mother and seven-year-old son, the mausoleum of the court astronomer Seyid Yahya Bakuvi, a mosque of 1441 and the ruins of a bathhouse.
Work on the Palace of the Shirvanshahs is thought to have stopped when Shirvanshah Farrukh Yassar was killed fighting Shah Ismail’s forces at the Battle of Jabani in 1500, with Baku falling the following year, which may be why an inscription frame above the Divankhana door was never carved.
4 – Maiden Tower
The Maiden Tower, or Qız Qalası, stands at the seaward edge of Baku’s Old City, almost 30 m tall with walls up to 5 m thick at the base, and took its present form in the 12th century, though its lower part may be far older.
Climb the Maiden Tower’s eight levels, each roofed with a stone dome with a round opening at its centre, past a small museum to the roof for views across the Old City and Baku Bay.
Nobody agrees what the Maiden Tower was built for, with theories ranging from Zoroastrian fire temple to observatory or defensive tower, and its name probably refers to its never having been taken, though legends tell of a maiden who leapt from the top.
5 – Walls of the Old City of Baku
The Walls of the Old City of Baku enclose about 22 hectares and were raised in the 12th century under Shirvanshah Manuchehr III, as a stone inscription records, while UNESCO listed the Old City in 2000, put it on its danger list in 2003 over earthquake damage, illegal demolition and uncontrolled building, then took it off in 2009.
Wander the Old City’s lanes to the Muhammad Mosque, whose minaret dates from 1078–79, and on to the 15th-century Multani and 16th-century Bukhara caravanserais, two of the old merchants’ inns inside the walls.
The Old City of Baku played Istanbul in the Soviet comedy The Diamond Arm (1969), and Kichik Gala street is where the hero slips and falls with a cry of “Chyort poberi!” (“Damn it!”).
6 – Ateshgah Fire Temple
The Ateshgah Fire Temple stands in Surakhani on the Absheron peninsula outside Baku, a pentagonal walled compound built in the 17th–18th centuries over natural gas vents and used by Hindu, Sikh and Parsi traders and pilgrims from India.
Pilgrims’ cells line the Ateshgah’s courtyard around a central altar pavilion with flames burning at its four corners, with inscriptions in Sanskrit, Punjabi and Persian dated 1668–1816, and Alexandre Dumas came to see the fire in 1858.
The Ateshgah’s natural fire went out in 1969 after decades of oil and gas extraction drained the gas beneath it, from Absheron fields that produced over 70% of Soviet oil in 1941 and were a main goal of Germany’s 1942 drive into the Caucasus, which never reached them.
7 – Yanar Dag
Yanar Dag, the “burning mountain”, is a hillside on the Absheron peninsula north of Baku, where gas seeping through the sandstone burns along a 10 m stretch of slope.
Visit Yanar Dag after dark, when the flames are at their most dramatic, on a peninsula whose wells around Baku produced more than half the world’s oil in 1901.
Local legend says a shepherd lit Yanar Dag by accident in the 1950s, but the region’s fires and oil drew attention long before, with Marco Polo writing from reports of an oil spring, generally taken to be Baku, whose oil was “good for burning”, while Zoroastrians revered fire as a symbol of the divine, not as a god in itself.