Things to do
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Ateshgah of Baku
Out in Baku's Surakhani settlement, you can walk the ring of small rooms where pilgrims from the Indian subcontinent once lived, and see the inscriptions they carved there in their own scripts.
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Baku Boulevard
Spend an evening on Baku's seafront promenade, where the Flame Towers stand on the hill above the Caspian bay and their lights reflect in the water after dark.
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Bibi-Heybat Mosque
The mosque in the village of Bibiheybət, on the Caspian shore south of the centre, is a modern rebuilding of a thirteenth-century original. It stands beside the road south to Gobustan, so a forty-minute stop fits easily into the day out to the rock art and the mud volcanoes.
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Carpet Museum
Rolled-carpet architecture by Franz Janz houses the national collection on the boulevard, with weaving traditions arranged by region and by knot. Looms are worked in the galleries by weavers who answer questions. Photography is allowed, the labels run in English, and an hour is enough unless carpets are the reason for the trip.
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Flame Towers
Three curved glass towers stand over the city from the Bayil slope, holding a hotel, apartments and offices behind a skin of LED panels. After dark the facades run flame animations visible across the bay. The towers work better as a view than a destination, and the funicular from the boulevard climbs to the terrace below them.
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Gobustan National Park
Petroglyphs cut into boulders on a limestone plateau south of the city record hunting scenes, dancers and reed boats over thousands of years, and UNESCO lists the reserve for them. A modern museum at the base explains the dating. Mud volcanoes bubble on a separate track nearby, reached by a rough road that ordinary cars struggle with.
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Heydar Aliyev Center
Zaha Hadid's white shell rises and folds without a straight line anywhere in the envelope, and the building has become the image of post-Soviet Baku. Inside are galleries, an auditorium and a collection of classic cars. The interior can be quieter than the queue outside suggests, and the lawns are where most photographs are taken.
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Juma Mosque
Juma, the Friday Mosque, is a working Shia mosque in the lanes of the Old City, with a minaret rising from its north wall. It sits a few minutes on foot from both the Maiden Tower and the Shirvanshahs' palace, so twenty minutes fits between the two, outside prayer times.
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Maiden Tower
Scholars have not settled what the Qiz Galasi was for: a fire temple, an observatory and a fortress have all been argued, and its lower stonework may predate the Islamic city around it. A stair of eight floors climbs to a roof terrace over the Old City and the bay. The stairs are narrow and traffic runs one way at busy hours.
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Martyrs' Lane
A long walkway on the hill above the bay passes the graves of soldiers and civilians and ends at the Eternal Flame memorial. The funicular from Neftchilar Avenue climbs to it in three minutes, and a stair runs alongside. It is a cemetery as well as a viewpoint over the Caspian, so voices stay low along the whole length of the walk.
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Nizami Museum of Azerbaijani Literature
A one-storey caravanserai from 1850 now holds the national literature museum, near the Old City entrance and close to Fountains Square. Manuscripts are the core of the collection, with a Persian copy of Nizami's Eskandar Nameh among the best known. An hour covers the galleries on the way into the Old City.
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Nizami Street
Downtown Baku's main shopping street runs for about three and a half kilometres, and its traffic-free section leads from Fountains Square to Rashid Behbudov Street. Fashion stores and banks fill the ground floors along the way. Keep to the pedestrian stretch, where an hour on foot covers the shops, and leave the sections that carry traffic alone.
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Old City
Walls from the twelfth century enclose a warren of lanes, caravanserais and hammams on a low rise above the bay, listed by UNESCO along with the Shirvanshah palace and the Maiden Tower. Carpet sellers and cafes fill the main routes, though the side streets stay residential. Entry is free and the lanes are walkable in an hour.
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Palace of the Shirvanshahs
Fifteenth century sandstone courtyards step down the slope inside the Old City, holding the shahs' residence, a divankhana, a mosque and a burial vault. Carved stone from the drowned Bayil castle is displayed in one room. Signage is thin, so the site rewards a guide or an audio tour, and an hour covers the terraces comfortably.
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Taza Pir Mosque
A Shia mosque a few minutes north of the Old City walls, Taza Pir has a facade of porticos with a minaret rising at each flank. As in any working mosque in the city, shoulders and head are covered and shoes come off inside, and half an hour fits between prayer times.
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Absheron National Park
Gazelles, Caspian seals and waterbirds are what this small coastal reserve protects, on semi-desert and dry steppe at the far eastern tip of the Absheron peninsula. The open ground has almost no shade, so carry water and a hat. Give it a morning or an afternoon of its own.
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Baku Museum of Miniature Books
Some of the books here are so small that they can only be read through a magnifying glass. Thousands of volumes from 64 countries make up the collection, inside the Old City, and it is the only museum of miniature books in the world. Half an hour is enough, a short walk from the Shirvanshahs' palace.
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Baku Museum of Modern Art
More than 800 works from the second half of the twentieth century fill the galleries of the city's modern art museum, on Yusif Safarov Street. Give the collection about an hour and a quarter, and take the metro to Şah İsmail Xətai, the nearest station to the museum.
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Fountains Square
Dozens of fountains play across this paved square a short walk from the Old City walls, with the Nizami literature museum close by on the way to the gate. It works as the meeting point between the walled town and the downtown shopping streets, and half an hour covers it before moving on in either direction.
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Mardakan Round Castle
Mardakan's round keep stands inside a ring of walls seven metres high, with solid towers set along their sides, in the resort settlement on the north-east of the Absheron peninsula. It dates from 1232 and now serves as a museum. Pair it with an afternoon on Mardakan's beaches for a day out east of the city.
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National Museum of History of Azerbaijan
The national history collection fills the former Taghiyev family residence, a mansion built between 1895 and 1901 on what is now Taghiyev Street. Its coin holdings alone run to around a hundred thousand ancient and oriental pieces. Allow an hour and a half for the galleries and the house itself.
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Ramana Tower
Rounded towers brace the corners of this stone fortress in the village of Ramana, in Baku's Sabunchu district north-east of the centre. The walls and corner towers are the sight. It sits on the same side of the city as the Ateshgah fire temple in Surakhani, so the two pair into one trip out of town.
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Villa Petrolea
Branobel, the Nobel brothers' oil company, built Villa Petrolea in 1882, and the estate now holds a museum of the brothers alongside offices and businesses. Its rooms are dressed with carpets woven locally and brought from Persia. It stands in the Keshla district, and an hour covers the museum.
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Yanar Dag
Natural gas seeping through a sandstone hillside on the Absheron peninsula keeps a wall of flame burning at the base of the slope, a few metres high and alight continuously for decades. A viewing terrace and a small museum sit above it. The fire reads as pale and thin in daylight, so dusk is the hour to come.
