Shazdeh Garden

Out in the semi-desert south-east of Kerman, at the foot of the mountains, a high wall encloses a long rectangle of green: Bagh-e Shazdeh, the Prince's Garden. Through the gate the ground rises in a series of broad steps towards a two-storey pavilion, and down the central axis water spills from basin to basin in a chain of small cascades and fountains, all driven by nothing more than the fall of the land. It is a true oasis — a rigidly geometric island of trees set against bare, dry ground — and since 2011 it has been one of the nine gardens inscribed together by UNESCO as the Persian Garden.

The garden belongs to the Qajar period. It was laid out around 1850 for Mohammad Hasan Khan Sardari Iravani, then governor of Kerman, and greatly enlarged from the 1870s by Abdolhamid Mirza Naser al-Dowleh, who governed the province for eleven years and used the main pavilion as a summer residence. His death in the early 1890s halted the work. Local tradition holds that when news of the governor's sudden death reached Mahan, a builder finishing the entrance portal struck his tray of plaster against the wall and walked away — and gaps in the tilework of the gateway are still pointed out as the proof. Neglected and divided in the first half of the 20th century, the garden was restored from 1959 onwards, registered as a national monument in 1975, and repaired again after earthquakes in 1981 and 2003.

The layout follows the Iranian takht, or "terraced", type. The walled rectangle covers 5.5 hectares, roughly 400 metres long and 120 metres wide, with the entrance building at the lower end — a long two-storey gatehouse with rooms for living and receiving guests on its upper floor — and the main residence, flanked by two wings, at the top. The water comes from a qanat, an underground channel bringing water down from the mountains to the south, and enters at the upper end before running down the axis and out into the beds. The planting was designed for shade and shelter as much as beauty: evergreen pines and cedars break the desert wind, elms, ashes, plane trees and poplars give shade, and the side plots are planted with vines, apples, pears, apricots, pomegranates, quinces and plums. Nearby Mahan is known above all for the shrine of the Sufi master Shah Nematollah Vali, who died in 1431 and whose domed tomb with turquoise-tiled minarets stands in the town.

Getting there

The garden lies about 4 km from the town of Mahan and about 35 km south-east of Kerman, near the road from Kerman to Bam. Kerman's Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani International Airport (KER) is about 42 km away.