Azerbaijan is where fire worship began — a hillside at Yanar Dag that has burned for centuries, a Zoroastrian fire temple at Ateshgah, and 6,000-year-old petroglyphs at Gobustan carved above the Caspian. Baku itself is a walled medieval old city with three glass flames rising behind it. It is the easiest, most surprising door into the Caucasus.
Baku City Discovery » 5-Day Fire of the Caucasus is a 5-day private tour of Azerbaijan, run on your own dates with a private guide and driver. You stay in 4-star Baku hotels with daily breakfast, a private vehicle and a licensed guide, with all site entrances included.
Prices are per person and drop as your group grows — from $1030 per person for two travellers down to $660 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
5-day Azerbaijan itinerary
Met at Baku airport and driven into a city on the Caspian that runs on oil and knows it. The world's first industrially drilled oil well went down here in 1846, and by 1900 half the planet's oil came out of this peninsula — which is why Baku has boulevards of Parisian mansions built by 19th-century oil barons, and why it now has three flame-shaped skyscrapers. Tonight, a walk in Icherisheher, the walled old city, which is UNESCO-listed and still lived in.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The Maiden Tower is 29 metres of solid stone and nobody agrees what it was for — a fortress, a Zoroastrian fire temple, an observatory; its dating ranges over a thousand years. The Palace of the Shirvanshahs was the seat of the local dynasty and is the finest medieval building in Azerbaijan. Then the modern half: the Flame Towers, lit at night with rippling fire, and Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Centre, a building with no straight lines anywhere in it — arguably the best thing she ever built.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Gobustan holds over six thousand rock carvings made across twelve thousand years — dancers, hunters, boats with rowers, aurochs. Thor Heyerdahl came here repeatedly, convinced the boats linked Azerbaijan to Scandinavia. Nearby, mud volcanoes bubble cold grey mud out of the ground; Azerbaijan has around half of all the mud volcanoes in the world. Then Ateshgah, a fire temple where Zoroastrians and Hindu pilgrims worshipped a natural gas flame, and Yanar Dag, a hillside that has simply been on fire, continuously, for decades.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The Carpet Museum is shaped like a rolled carpet, which sounds like a gimmick and works completely; inside, it explains what the knots and symbols in an Azerbaijani rug actually mean, which changes how you look at every carpet afterwards. The History Museum sits in an oil baron's mansion. Then Nizami Street and Fountain Square, and the Boulevard along the Caspian — the sea here is the largest enclosed body of water on Earth, and it is not salty enough to taste like sea.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Baku airport for your onward flight. End of our services.
