Gobustan & Absheron Tour from Baku – Mud Volcanoes, Fire Temple & Yanardag

The first stop is the Bibiheybat Mosque, standing on a bluff above the bay just outside the city. The original was built in the thirteenth century over the tomb of Ukeyma Khanum, a descendant of the Prophet, and became one of the most important places of pilgrimage in the region. It was demolished in 1936 and rebuilt from the ground up in the 1990s, following the historical design — the version you see today is a reconstruction of a building that stood for seven centuries.

Gobustan National Park protects one of the densest collections of prehistoric rock art anywhere in the world. More than six thousand carvings are spread across the boulder fields of Boyukdash and the neighbouring hills, cut by people who lived here across some forty thousand years: hunting scenes, rows of dancers, aurochs, and — surprisingly for a place this far inland — long reed boats. The Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2007.

Two things here tend to stay with people. The first is the Gaval Dash, a flat slab of rock that rings like a tambourine when struck, still used to play rhythms. The second is a Latin inscription left by a soldier of the Roman Twelfth Legion in the first century AD — the easternmost Roman inscription ever found. The Gobustan museum on the site puts the carvings into chronological order before you walk up to them.

From the park, a 4x4 takes over for the last stretch — the track out to the volcano field is too rough for a coach, and this transfer is included in your tour price. The Gobustan mud volcanoes are not volcanic in the usual sense: there is no heat and no lava. Pressurised gas pushes cold grey mud to the surface, building low cones that gurgle, pop and occasionally throw out a spatter of clay. Azerbaijan has close to half of all the mud volcanoes on the planet, and this is the best place to stand among them. The landscape is genuinely strange — grey, cratered and often compared to the surface of the moon.

After lunch the route crosses to the other side of the peninsula and the village of Surakhani, where the Ateshgah Fire Temple stands. Built in its present pentagonal form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ateshgah is laid out like a caravanserai, with cells around a courtyard and an altar at the centre where a natural gas vent once burned unaided. Inscriptions carved above the doorways are in Sanskrit and Persian, left by Indian merchants and ascetics who worshipped here on the trade route, and the site connects to Zoroastrian fire veneration older still. It has been a museum since the 1970s.

Yanardag is the simplest sight of the day and, for many, the most memorable: a low hillside where natural gas seeps through the sandstone and burns in a continuous wall of flame, three metres wide and never extinguished — not by rain, not by snow. Fires like this are what gave the country its Land of Fire name, and travellers have been writing about them since the Middle Ages. The flames are at their most dramatic after dark, but they burn all day.

On the way back into the city there is a photo stop at the Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid and opened in 2012. Its white curves avoid straight lines almost entirely, and the building won Design of the Year in 2014 — the first time the award went to a work of architecture. The surrounding park is where the best photographs are taken.