Badab-e Surt
Interesting facts
- Badab joins the Persian words for 'gas' and 'water', after the naturally carbonated springs, while Surt is an old name of nearby Orost village.
- The minerals first settle out as soft, jelly-like deposits of iron and calcium carbonate, which only later harden into solid travertine.
- Geologists date the formation of the terraces to the Pliocene and Pleistocene, millions of years before the present landscape took shape.
- The salty spring feeds a natural pool roughly 15 metres across, while the sour, iron-rich spring rises higher up the slope to the north-west.
- Russian traveller Grigory Melgunov, touring the southern Caspian lands in 1858 and 1860, recorded the site as the spring of Arus, an old form of Orost.
- Wild barberry bushes grow around the springs, with conifer forests on the slopes above and pine woods to the north.
Why it is worth it
High in the Alborz range of Mazandaran, at roughly 1,840 metres above sea level, a hillside steps down in a cascade of shallow terraces stained orange, rust and lemon yellow. Badab-e Surt is a travertine spring field: mineral water rising from the slope is saturated with calcium and iron carbonate, and as it reaches the air and loses its dissolved carbon dioxide the minerals settle out, building rim after rim of stone. Over thousands of years the deposits have grown into a natural staircase of hundreds of terraces and dozens of stepped pools.
What makes the place unlike most travertine terraces is its colour. Instead of the chalk-white of Pamukkale, the rock here is dyed by iron oxide, so that the pools run from pale cream at their edges to a deep, almost metallic orange where the sediment is thickest. Two springs feed the site and they are strikingly different: one is salty and has long been used locally as a remedy for rheumatism and skin complaints, while the other tastes sour and carries the iron-rich sediment that gives the terraces their glow.
The setting adds to the effect. The springs sit on an open mountainside above wooded valleys, and in the low light of late afternoon or early morning the wet terraces catch the sun like a stack of copper dishes. Look closely at the rims: each lip is a delicate scalloped edge of freshly deposited stone, and the pattern of ripples records the slow, seasonal flow of the water. In 2008 Iran registered Badab-e Surt as a national natural monument, the second after Mount Damavand.
Getting there
The springs lie about 95 km south-east of Sari, the capital of Mazandaran, and a few kilometres east of the village of Orost in Sari County. The nearest airport is Sari Dasht-e Naz International Airport (SRY), about 68 km away in a straight line; the small town of Galugah is about 42 km away across the mountains. Two paved routes reach Orost: from Sari through the Kiasar forest, or from Semnan on the southern side of the range via Shahmirzad. The last stretch from Orost to the springs is an unpaved mountain track, best tackled in a high-clearance or four-wheel-drive vehicle.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Badab Surt is a natural site in the Mazandaran Province in northern Iran, 95 kilometres (59 mi) south-east of the city of Sari, and 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) east of the village Orost. It comprises a range of stepped travertine terrace formations that have been created over thousands of years as flowing water from two mineral hot springs cooled and deposited carbonate minerals on the mountainside.
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