Dasht-e Lut

Dasht-e Lut — in Persian, roughly "the bare plain" — fills a vast basin in south-eastern Iran, about 480 km long and 320 km wide, enclosed by mountains on every side. It is one of the driest and hottest places on Earth: satellite instruments have measured ground temperatures here above 70 °C, the highest land-surface readings recorded anywhere. Yet what makes the Lut extraordinary is not its emptiness but its shapes. Few deserts show so clearly, on such a scale, what wind alone can do to a landscape, and that is why UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage site in 2016.

The great spectacle is the kaluts, the yardangs of the central Lut. Over a belt some 150 km long, the wind has carved soft sedimentary deposits into long parallel ridges separated by deep corridors, like the hulls of an immense fleet of upturned ships or the ruined walls of a city. The tallest stand many tens of metres high, and they are counted among the tallest and most continuous yardang fields in the world. In the low sun of morning and evening their flanks turn amber and rose and their shadows stretch for hundreds of metres across the floor of the corridors.

The rest of the basin is just as varied. The east is a low plateau of salt flats; the south-east is a sea of sand whose dunes, including complex star dunes, reach some of the greatest heights known; and on the Gandom Beryan plateau, a sheet of dark lava, the black rock soaks up the sun and produces the record ground temperatures. After the brief spring rains, water runs down from the Kerman mountains into the basin and quickly vanishes, leaving salt crusts behind.

The edges of the desert have a deep human history. Shahdad, on the western rim, was the site of an ancient city, and the wider region was home around 2500 BC to the Jiroft culture; far to the east lay Shahr-e Sukhteh, the Burnt City. Archaeological surveys along the western fringe have recorded dozens of ancient sites, a reminder that the desert's margins, fed by mountain water, have long been settled even if its heart never was.

Getting there

The Lut is a huge area; the nearest town in a straight line to its centre is Bam, about 154 km away, with Bam Airport (BXR) at a similar distance, about 152 km. Most visitors come from Kerman, whose airport (KER) is the main gateway, and approach the kaluts from Shahdad on the western edge of the desert; the kalut area begins some 40 km beyond the town. The interior of the desert has no services, and trips into it are usually made with local guides and suitable vehicles.