Isfahan

Officially Imam Square, and listed by UNESCO in 1979 as Meidan Emam, this is one of the largest city squares on earth: more than half a kilometre long, framed on all sides by two storeys of arcades that once held shops, workshops and lodgings. Shah Abbas used it for polo, parades and markets, and the stone goalposts of the polo field still stand at each end. Today it is a park of lawns, fountains and horse carriages, busiest after sunset when families picnic on the grass and the domes are lit.

The square was the scene of the most serious heritage damage in Isfahan during the 2026 war. On 9 March 2026 strikes on government buildings near the square and Chehel Sotoun sent blast waves across the old centre, and Iranian officials and international reporters described shattered doors and windows, fallen tiles and structural damage on buildings around the square. UNESCO said it had verified damage at several Iranian World Heritage sites; the full extent and the state of repairs had not been independently published at the time of writing.

TipWhen visits are possible again, come twice: once in the morning for the buildings, and again at dusk, when the square becomes the city's living room.

Also known as the Imam Mosque or Masjed-e Abbasi, the great mosque on the south side of the square was begun in 1611 and finished late in Shah Abbas's reign. Its entrance portal faces the square, but the mosque itself is turned towards Mecca, so a clever angled vestibule links the two. Inside, four great iwans, vaulted halls open to a courtyard, surround a pool, and almost every surface is covered in blue and yellow tiles, many in the faster haft rangi technique of painted squares that let the shah finish so vast a building in his lifetime. Stand under the main dome and clap: the echo is famous. Reports from March 2026 described damage to the mosque's turquoise tilework from the nearby blasts.

On the east side of the square, this small mosque has no minaret and no courtyard: it was built as a private place of prayer for the royal household and reached from the palace opposite by a passage under the square. Its cream-and-rose dome changes colour through the day. Inside, a dim, twisting corridor opens into a single domed chamber covered with tiles, where a shaft of light through the dome's lattice windows creates the figure of a peacock's tail at the centre. Many consider it the most perfect interior of the Safavid age.

The "Lofty Gate" was the entrance to the royal palace grounds, and its high wooden veranda let the shah and his guests watch polo and parades in the square below. Climb the narrow stairs past painted rooms to the top floor, where the music room's walls and ceiling are cut into hundreds of vase- and bottle-shaped niches, designed for display and, according to tradition, to improve the acoustics. Officials said blasts in March 2026 shattered doors and windows here.

West of the square, in a walled garden, stands a pavilion completed under Shah Abbas II in 1647 for receptions and banquets. Its name means "forty columns": twenty slender wooden pillars hold up the veranda, and their reflection in the long pool doubles them. Inside, large wall paintings show royal feasts and battles, including the Safavid defeat at Chaldiran and victories over Mughal and Uzbek armies. The garden is one of the nine that make up UNESCO's Persian Garden listing.

Chehel Sotoun was among the worst-hit monuments of the 2026 war. It stands close to the provincial government buildings struck on 9 March, and reports and video described cracks running through the seventeenth-century paintings and damage to the pavilion and garden. One specialist in Safavid art described it as perhaps the most seriously damaged heritage site in Iran at that point. Check its status before planning any future visit.

Behind the monumental Qeysarieh portal at the north end of the square begins a covered bazaar that runs for about two kilometres towards the old Friday Mosque. Under brick vaults and domes pierced by skylights, the lanes are divided by trade: carpets and printed cotton (qalamkar) near the square, then copper and enamel workers, spice sellers, gold dealers and everyday stalls selling clothes and kitchenware further north. Caravanserais, bathhouses and small mosques open off the main lanes. It is a working market, so trade slows on Friday and during religious holidays.

At the far end of the bazaar, the Friday Mosque predates Safavid Isfahan by centuries and is, in effect, a museum of Iranian architecture. UNESCO, which listed it in 2012, notes more than twelve hundred years of building on the site. The four-iwan courtyard plan seen here was copied across the Islamic world, and the two Seljuk domes of the eleventh century, especially the small, perfectly proportioned north dome, are masterpieces of brickwork. Wander the forest of brick-vaulted prayer halls, each different, and the winter prayer hall lit through alabaster. Some reports listed the mosque among the buildings affected in 2026, though details were sparse.

Built around 1650 under Shah Abbas II, Khaju is both a bridge and a weir. Its lower level of stone steps and sluices could hold back the river, and its upper arcades and central pavilions gave the shah a place to sit above the water. In the evening, people traditionally gather in the arches, where the acoustics carry singing and conversation. When the river flows the steps make a gentle cascade; when it is dry, as it often is now, you can walk underneath.

The "bridge of thirty-three arches" was built around 1602 by Allahverdi Khan, one of Shah Abbas's generals, to carry the main avenue of Chahar Bagh over the river towards the Armenian quarter. At almost 300 metres long, with a walkway sheltered by arcades on two levels, it is one of the most elegant bridges anywhere. The Zayandeh River has run dry for much of most years since the 2000s because of drought and upstream water use, and the authorities release water only at certain times; the bridge is still lovely, but don't expect the river.

South of the river lies New Julfa, settled in the early seventeenth century by Armenian merchants whom Shah Abbas moved from Julfa on the Aras River to boost the silk trade. Their Holy Saviour Cathedral, known simply as Vank ("monastery"), looks modest outside, with a brick dome that blends with the city's mosques, but inside every surface is painted with gilded floral work and biblical scenes, including vivid depictions of the Last Judgement. A museum in the grounds tells the history of the community and of the Armenian genocide. The neighbourhood's cafés and quiet lanes make a pleasant end to the walk. Our Armenia guide covers the community's homeland.

Kashan, about 200 kilometres north of Isfahan on the edge of the central desert, grew rich on carpets, silk and rosewater, and its nineteenth-century merchants built sunken courtyard houses of great refinement. The Tabatabaei House, built for a carpet merchant, has several courtyards, stained-glass windows, mirror work and plaster carved as finely as lace. A short walk away, the Borujerdi House, made for a family linked by marriage to the Tabatabaeis, is known for its tall domed hall and wind-catchers that funnel breezes into the rooms. Both show how comfortable life was made in the desert heat before air conditioning.

TipThe nearby Sultan Amir Ahmad Bathhouse, with its stepped rooftop of domes, and the Agha Bozorg Mosque, with its sunken courtyard, fit easily into the same half-day.

On the edge of town, fed by a spring that has watered this site for centuries, Bagh-e Fin is perhaps the purest example of the classic Persian garden: a walled rectangle crossed by turquoise channels and fountains that run by gravity alone, shaded by ancient cypresses, with Safavid and Qajar pavilions at its heart. It is part of UNESCO's Persian Garden listing. The garden also holds a dark place in modern Iranian memory: in its bathhouse in 1852, the reforming chief minister Amir Kabir was murdered on the shah's orders.

Yazd, on the road east between two deserts, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and its old town, listed by UNESCO in 2017, is almost entirely built of sun-dried mud brick. Lanes wind between windowless walls and under vaulted passages, and the skyline bristles with badgir, wind-catchers that cool the houses below, while underground qanat channels bring water from distant mountains. The Jameh Mosque, with the tallest pair of minarets in Iran over a tiled portal, is the anchor of a walk; climb to one of the rooftop cafés at sunset for the view across the domes.

The three-storey façade of niches on this square, illuminated at night, is the symbol of Yazd. Built as the entrance to a fifteenth-century religious and commercial complex, it is now a meeting point at the edge of the old town, near the bazaar and the confectioners who sell Yazd's famous pastries, baklava and the cardamom-scented cakes called qottab. Yazd is also the centre of Iran's Zoroastrian community: the Atash Behram fire temple, a short ride away, keeps a sacred flame that believers say has burned for some fifteen centuries.

This eighteenth-century garden, another of UNESCO's nine Persian gardens, was the residence of Yazd's governor. A long pool flanked by pines and pomegranates leads to a pavilion topped by what is said to be the tallest wind-catcher in Iran, at more than 30 metres; stand under it on a hot afternoon to feel how well it works. The coloured glass windows throw patterns across the floors in the late afternoon.

On two bare hills on the southern edge of the city stand the dakhmeh, circular stone enclosures where, until the mid-twentieth century, Zoroastrians laid out their dead to be cleaned by vultures and the sun, so as not to pollute earth or fire. The practice was ended in the 1960s and burials now take place in a cemetery below, but the towers remain a quiet, atmospheric place, best at sunset, with ruined ceremonial buildings at their base.

On a windy plain north of Shiraz stands the simple stone tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BC. Its stepped plinth and gabled chamber have survived two and a half thousand years, and Alexander the Great is recorded as ordering its repair. Around it lie the scattered remains of Cyrus's capital, the first of the great Persian palace cities, with the remains of audience halls, a gatehouse relief of a winged figure and the outline of a royal garden that some historians see as the first chahar bagh, the four-part garden. UNESCO listed it in 2004. The site is open and exposed, with little shade.

A few kilometres from Persepolis, four royal tombs are cut high into a cliff face in the shape of a cross. They are believed to belong to Darius the Great, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I and Darius II. Below them, much later reliefs of the Sasanian dynasty show kings on horseback, including the famous scene of Shapur I triumphing over the captured Roman emperor Valerian. The square stone building facing the cliff, the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht, is still debated by archaeologists.

Darius the Great began his ceremonial capital, Parsa, around 518 BC on a vast stone terrace at the foot of a mountain, and his successors added to it until Alexander the Great burned it in 330 BC. Climb the double staircase to the Gate of All Nations, guarded by human-headed bulls, and walk through the forest of columns that once held up the Apadana audience hall. The highlight is the carved staircase of the Apadana, where processions of delegates from across the empire, Medes, Elamites, Bactrians, Ethiopians and more, bring gifts of animals, cloth and gold, carved in crisp detail. UNESCO listed the site in 1979, and the royal tombs cut into the hillside above give a view over the whole terrace.

TipArrive at opening time, before the heat and tour buses; there is very little shade on the terrace.

Shiraz has been the city of poetry, wine and roses in the Persian imagination for centuries, and its most beloved son is the fourteenth-century poet Hafez. His tomb, under an open pavilion in a garden of orange trees, is a place of pilgrimage for Iranians of every kind, who come to recite his verses and to tell their fortune by opening a book of his poems at random. Evening is the best time, when the garden fills with people. Saadi, the city's other great poet, has his own mausoleum on the north-east edge of town.

Built in the 1880s under the Qajar dynasty, the "Pink Mosque" is known for its rose-coloured tiles and above all for its winter prayer hall, where the morning sun pours through stained-glass windows and covers the carpets and columns in pools of coloured light. It is one of the most photographed interiors in the country. The bazaar of Vakil and the eighteenth-century Arg of Karim Khan, a brick citadel with a leaning tower, are a short walk away.

TipThe light show happens only in the morning, strongest from autumn to spring; go as early as the mosque opens.

The "Garden of Paradise", now the botanical garden of Shiraz University, is a terraced Persian garden of tall cypresses, roses, citrus trees and a long pool reflecting a tiled Qajar mansion. It is the last of the Persian Garden listings on this route and a fine place to finish, especially in spring, when Shiraz is fragrant with orange blossom.