Gobustan National Park

The carvings depict hunting parties, cattle, boats, dancing figures, and animals long since gone from this landscape — including lions and gazelle, which tells you how radically the climate has changed.

The best known are the 'yalli' dance scenes: lines of figures linked at the arms, moving in step. The remarkable thing is that the same dance form is still performed in Azerbaijan today, at weddings and celebrations. The continuity between a Neolithic carving and a living tradition is not something you often get to see directly.

The reed-boat carvings drew Thor Heyerdahl to Gobustan repeatedly. He argued they suggested contact with Scandinavian rock-art traditions and, more ambitiously, that Norse ancestry might trace to this region. The theory remains contested and is not accepted by most scholars, but his interest brought Gobustan international attention it would not otherwise have had.

The interpretation centre at the entrance is among the best-designed museum spaces in Azerbaijan — interactive displays, projections, reconstructions and strong English labelling, at a noticeably higher production standard than most museums in the country.

Visit it before walking the trail, not after. Without context the carvings are marks on rock; with it, they resolve into a legible record. The museum covers dating methods, the changing climate, the fauna depicted, and how interpretation has shifted over time.

Also on the site is a first-century Roman inscription, left by a centurion of Legio XII Fulminata during the reign of Domitian.

It marks approximately the easternmost known Roman inscription anywhere, and encountering it in a semi-desert boulder field several thousand kilometres from Rome is a genuinely startling moment. It is a reminder of how far the empire's reconnaissance actually reached.

The surrounding area holds one of the world's densest concentrations of mud volcanoes — low cones that push up cold grey mud and gas rather than lava.

They are covered on their own page. Reaching them requires transferring into a high-clearance local vehicle at the turn-off, arranged on the day, because the track is unsuitable for normal cars.