The Most Beautiful Places in Baku
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Baku are Palace of the Shirvanshahs, Heydar Aliyev Center and Maiden Tower. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Baku sits on the Absheron Peninsula, a dry, windy tongue of land pushing into the Caspian Sea, and few cities show their geology so openly. Natural gas seeps out of the ground here, mud volcanoes bubble on the coast to the south, and oil drilling from the 19th century onward turned the city into one of the first great oil capitals. Layered over this are centuries of Silk Road trade, the walled Old City of the Shirvan shahs and a 21st-century skyline built on oil wealth.
The Old City holds the two classic monuments. The Palace of the Shirvanshahs, a 15th-century complex of stone halls, a mosque and a mausoleum, steps down its hillside in pale limestone, while the cylindrical Maiden Tower, whose exact age is still debated, rises above the old harbour walls. Together they form part of a World Heritage Site.
Outside the walls, the range runs from the very old to the very new. Gobustan, south of the city, preserves thousands of rock carvings of hunters, boats and animals made over many millennia on boulders above the Caspian shore. At Surakhani, the Ateshgah is a pentagonal fire temple built by Indian merchants around a vent where gas once burned on its own. And the Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid and opened in 2012, flows over its plaza in white curves without a single straight edge in sight.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Palace of the Shirvanshahs | Palace | ✓ |
| 2 | Heydar Aliyev Center | Museum | |
| 3 | Maiden Tower | Monument | ✓ |
| 4 | Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve | Protected area | ✓ |
| 5 | Ateshgah of Baku | Temple |
01 Palace of the Shirvanshahs
Azerbaijan · 4.1 km from Baku40.366° N 49.833° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Palace of the Shirvanshahs crowns the highest point of Baku's walled Old City, a compact ensemble of stone buildings from the fifteenth century. The Shirvanshahs were the long-lived dynasty of Shirvan, and under Ibrahim I they moved their capital to Baku after an earthquake devastated their old seat at Shamakhi.
Did you know? The eastern portal, known as Murad's Gate, is dated by its inscription to 1585–86, during the Ottoman occupation of Baku.
02 Heydar Aliyev Center
Azerbaijan · 0.6 km from Baku40.395° N 49.867° E
Image by gbella from Pixabay Few buildings anywhere look so little like buildings. The Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku rises out of its landscaped hill as a single white surface that folds, swells and peels away from the ground, turning wall into roof and roof into plaza without a visible seam or a single hard corner.
Did you know? The July 2012 fire began on the roof through careless use of welding equipment, and three contractors faced criminal charges afterwards.
03 Maiden Tower
Azerbaijan · 4 km from Baku40.366° N 49.837° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Maxxja from Pixabay Baku, Azerbaijan's capital on the Caspian Sea, keeps its medieval heart inside the walls of the Old City, Icherisheher, and the Maiden Tower is its emblem. 5 m at the base.
Did you know? The pipes were thrown on a potter's wheel and joined with lime mortar, and their sediments could one day help date the tower scientifically.
04 Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve
Azerbaijan40.106° N 49.389° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 About 70 km south-west of Baku, where the dry hills of the Caspian coast break up into boulder fields and flat-topped mesas, Gobustan preserves one of the richest bodies of rock art in the world.
Did you know? Rows of linked dancing figures are often compared to yalli, the traditional round dance still performed in Azerbaijan today.
05 Ateshgah of Baku
Azerbaijan · 12.8 km from Baku40.416° N 50.009° E
Jesper Ahlin Marceta · CC BY-SA 4.0 A pentagonal walled courtyard with an open fire altar at its heart, the Ateshgah of Baku stands on ground where natural gas once seeped from the earth and burned on its own.
Did you know? In 1925 the Parsi scholar Jivanji Jamshedji Modi travelled to Baku to test its Zoroastrian claims and concluded it was a Hindu fire temple.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Baku?
- On our list, Palace of the Shirvanshahs ranks first, followed by Heydar Aliyev Center and Maiden Tower.
- Why is Baku called the land of fire?
- Natural gas seeps to the surface across the Absheron Peninsula and has fed flames burning from the ground for centuries. These fires drew Zoroastrian and Hindu worshippers, which is why the Ateshgah fire temple was built at Surakhani.
- What can you see at Gobustan?
- Gobustan is known for thousands of prehistoric rock carvings showing people, animals and reed boats, and for the mud volcanoes in the surrounding area. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.
- Who designed the Heydar Aliyev Center?
- The Heydar Aliyev Center was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and opened in 2012. Its continuous curving white skin is one of the best-known examples of her fluid architecture.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Baku?
- In our collection, the places in Baku are most often nature sanctuaries (1), temples (1), palaces (1) and monuments (1).
- How many places are on this list in Baku?
- The list covers 5 places.