Baku City Walking Tour – Old City & Modern Highlights

We meet at the Qosha Gala Gate, the twin-arched gateway in the fortress wall that has been the main entrance to the old town for centuries. Your guide gives you the layout of the city here — where the walls run, what lies inside them, and how the medieval town relates to the modern districts outside.

Inside the walls, Old City Baku is still a living neighbourhood: families live behind the carved wooden doors, and cats sleep on the caravanserai steps. Walking through Icherisheher you pass medieval city walls, restored caravanserais where traders once stopped, a bathhouse, small mosques and the balconied houses that give the quarter its character. Your guide explains how each layer — Shirvanshah, Persian, Russian imperial, Soviet — left its mark on the same few streets.

The Maiden Tower is the symbol of Baku and the most photographed monument in Azerbaijan, yet nobody can say with certainty when it was built or what it was for — a fortress, a fire temple, an observatory. Your guide walks you through the competing theories and the legends that grew around the name. Climbing to the roof terrace is optional and paid separately; the view over the rooftops to the bay is worth the 15 AZN.

The Palace of the Shirvanshahs is the finest surviving example of Azerbaijani medieval architecture — a 15th-century complex of courtyards holding the royal residence, a mosque with its minaret, a burial vault, a bathhouse and the mausoleum of the court astronomer. Your guide explains what each building was used for and why the dynasty moved its capital here from Shamakhi.

A short stop at the Museum of Miniature Books, a small private collection near the palace and the only museum of its kind in the world. Thousands of tiny volumes from dozens of countries are displayed, some small enough to need a magnifying glass. It is a brief but memorable pause before the walk out of the Old City.

Leaving the walls, we walk down to Baku Boulevard, the seaside promenade along the Caspian. This stretch takes in Little Venice — the network of small canals also known as Mini Venice, where you can ride a gondola for 5 AZN — and the Baku Ferris Wheel turning at the water's edge. Your guide explains how the oil boom of the 1900s, and then the second boom after independence, produced the city you are standing in.

From the Boulevard the funicular climbs to Highland Park, the terrace that gives the classic panorama of Baku: the bay, the Old City walls below and the three Flame Towers rising behind you. This is the best photo stop of the tour and the point where the contrast the whole walk is built on — medieval Icherisheher against a glass skyline — becomes obvious at a glance.

The walk ends at the Alley of Martyrs, the memorial along the ridge commemorating those who died in January 1990 and in the Karabakh war, with an eternal flame and a wide view over the bay. It is a quiet, reflective close to the afternoon and a part of Azerbaijan's recent history that most visitors know nothing about before they arrive.