Baku: Gobustan, Fire Temple, Yanar Dag & Old City Gift｜Azerbaijan

Explore Gobustan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and see the mud volcanoes, Fire Temple, and Burning Mountain on a full-day tour from Baku.

Start your day with a pickup in Baku and head to Gobustan National Park. Explore the park and see the Gobustan Rocks, which represent flora and fauna, hunting, lifestyles, and culture of pre-historic and medieval periods of time.

See carvings on the rocks that illustrate men, ritual dances, men with lances in their hands, animals, bull fights, camel caravans, and pictures of the sun and stars. The date of these carvings goes back 5,000-20,000 years.

Next, visit the mud volcanoes, which are spread broadly across the country. 350 of the 700 volcanoes of the world are in the Azerbaijani Republic.

Continue to the Ateshgah, which is often called the Fire Temple of Baku. It is a castle-like religious temple in Surakhany town. Based on Iranian and Indian inscriptions, the temple was used as a Hindu, Sikh, and Zoroastrian place of worship.

The pentagonal complex, which has a courtyard surrounded by cells for monks and an altar in the middle, was built during the 17th and 18th centuries. It was abandoned in the late 19th century, probably due to the dwindling of the Indian population in the area. The natural eternal flame went out in 1969, after nearly a century of usage of the petroleum and gas in the area, but is now lit by gas piped from the nearby city.

Finally, visit the Burning Mountain (Azerbaijani: Yanar Dağ), a natural gas fire which blazes continuously on a hillside on the Absheron Peninsula on the Caspian Sea near Baku. Flames jet 3 meters into the air from a thin, porous sandstone layer. The Yanar Dagh fire is never extinguished. Around this open fireplace, the atmosphere is filled with the smell of gas. The flames emanate from vents in sandstone formations and rise to a height of 10 meters at the base of a 10-meter-wide scarp below a hillside.