Iran
Discover Iran
Introduction
Iran is large — almost the size of France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined — and organised around two mountain ranges and two deserts. The Zagros runs diagonally down the west and the Alborz along the north, carrying Mount Damavand at over five and a half thousand metres. Between and beyond them lie the Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut, the latter having recorded some of the highest land surface temperatures ever measured.
The cities are the reason to come. Isfahan has one of the largest squares in the world with two of its finest mosques on it; Shiraz has gardens, poets’ tombs and Persepolis an hour away; Yazd is a desert city of mudbrick, windcatchers and Zoroastrian fire; and Kashan has merchant houses built around sunken courtyards. Tehran, at the foot of the Alborz, is the modern capital and holds the national museums and the crown jewels.
Two landscapes surprise people. The Caspian coast in the north is humid, forested and rice-growing, with nothing desert about it. And the Persian Gulf islands in the south — Qeshm and Hormuz — are geological oddities of salt domes and coloured rock. Twenty-eight UNESCO World Heritage sites sit in a country that receives a small fraction of the visitors that heritage would justify.