Fin Garden

Fin Garden lies a few kilometres south-west of Kashan, on the edge of the desert plain, and it is the oldest Persian garden still standing in Iran. Laid out under Shah Abbas the Great and finished in 1590, it is a walled rectangle of about two and a quarter hectares, guarded by ramparts with round towers at the corners. Inside, everything is organised by water. Old trees line the axes, and straight stone channels run between them, widening into pools and narrowing again so that the flow speeds up and slows down as you walk beside it.

The source of all this is the Soleymaniyeh spring, fed by a qanat whose mother well lies some two kilometres upstream. The spring delivers an average of some 350 litres a second, enough to keep every channel, pool and jet of the garden running, and its steady murmur is the garden's real soundtrack. At the centre stands the pavilion, the kushk, the place from which the axes of water and trees are best read. The contrast between the cool green interior and the dry hills visible over the walls is the whole point of the Persian garden, and here it can still be felt rather than imagined.

The garden also holds one of the sombre episodes of Iranian history. In 1852 Amir Kabir, the reforming chief minister of Naser al-Din Shah, was put to death in the bathhouse of Fin on the shah's orders, and the small bath, with its domed rooms, is shown to visitors with that story attached. Fin Garden was registered as a national monument in 1935 and is one of the gardens inscribed together by UNESCO as the Persian Garden; a section of the grounds also houses the National Museum of Kashan, opened in 1968.

Getting there

The garden is about 6.5 km from the centre of Kashan, a historic city in Isfahan Province famous for the grand courtyard houses of its nineteenth-century merchants. Kashan lies on Iran's main north–south railway between Tehran and Isfahan and is linked by freeway to Isfahan and Qom. Kashan Airport (KKS), about 20 km away, returned to service in 2016 after two decades without flights but has few connections, so most travellers arrive by road or rail. Taxis run from the city centre to the garden.