Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve

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. The reserve protects more than 6,000 carvings spread over 537 hectares of the Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, inscribed by UNESCO in 2007; the oldest were cut some 20,000 years ago and the youngest about 5,000. The area was first protected in 1966, in the Soviet period, and became a national reserve in 2007.

The carvings record a very different world. When the first were made, the climate was far wetter and the hills were grazed by wild cattle, horses, deer and goats. Hunters with bows, groups of dancers linked hand in hand, bulls, boats crewed by oarsmen, camel caravans and suns and stars cover the faces of fallen blocks and rock shelters, often with newer images cut over older ones. Some human figures have small featureless heads, while others are detailed; carvings in the Seven Beauties cave suggest that women took part in hunting. The reed boats fascinated Thor Heyerdahl, who visited several times between 1981 and his death in 2002. Start at the petroglyph museum, open since 2011, which explains the images before you walk the trails among them.

Two curiosities stand out. At the entrance lies the Gaval Dash, a flat stone about two metres long that rings like a tambourine when struck with a smaller rock, one of several "singing stones" in the area. And on a rock at the foot of Boyukdash mountain is a Latin inscription carved by a centurion of the Twelfth Legion, Fulminata, in the reign of Domitian in the late first century AD. It is the easternmost Latin inscription known and the only one found in ancient Caucasian Albania, taken by most historians as evidence of a Roman military presence here.

A second landscape lies a short drive away. Of the roughly 700 mud volcanoes on earth, about 300 are thought to be in the Gobustan area and under the adjacent Caspian; their cones ooze and bubble with mud, and some visitors bathe in it, believing it to be healing. A visitor complex opened near the volcanoes in 2024, with paths, an observation tower and a small natural history exhibition.

Getting there

The reserve is near the town of Gobustan, about 70 km from Baku and about 38 km from the Baku suburb of Lökbatan. Buses and minibuses run from Baku to Gobustan town, from where local taxis go to the rock-art site and the mud volcanoes; many visitors instead take a taxi or tour from Baku, about an hour's drive. Heydar Aliyev International Airport (GYD) is about 70 km away.