Baku travel guide

Top 10 sights in Baku

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© Bruno Girin · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Palace of the Shirvanshahs

   The fifteenth-century palace of the dynasty that ruled this coast for six hundred years, on the highest ground of the walled city. The complex takes in a court hall, a bath house, a mosque and a domed burial vault, all in the same honey-coloured stone, and is World Heritage with the old city around it.

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   Old City of Baku

   The walled core of Baku, listed as World Heritage in 2000, with twelfth-century ramparts still complete on three sides. People live in it — laundry, cats, carpet shops — which is what distinguishes it from the restored old towns elsewhere on the Caspian.

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3. 

   3© Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Maiden Tower

   A twelfth-century tower of about twenty-nine metres in the old city, and nobody knows what it was for: a fire tower, an observatory, a Zoroastrian burial platform and a fortress have all been argued. The legend of a girl who threw herself from it came much later than the building.

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4. 

   4© Urek Meniashvili · CC BY-SA 3.0

   National Art Museum of Azerbaijan

   The largest art museum in Azerbaijan, opened in 1936 in two adjoining nineteenth-century mansions and named after the stage designer Rustam Mustafayev. Azerbaijani painting from the oil-boom decades onward is the part worth the time.

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5. 

   5© Interfase · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Baku TV Tower

   A concrete television tower of 1996 rising three hundred and ten metres above the city, the tallest structure in the Caucasus. It appears in the opening shot of most films made here, and there is a revolving restaurant partway up.

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6. 

   6© Sefer azeri · CC BY-SA 4.0

   National Museum of History of Azerbaijan

   The national history museum, in the mansion of Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, the illiterate stonemason who struck oil and became the richest man in the Caucasus. His own rooms are preserved on the upper floor, which is the best part of the museum.

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7. 

   7© Rzv Rauf · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Baku Zoo

   The city zoo in the Narimanov district, on about four hectares, holding the animals of the Caucasus and Central Asia along with a collection of Caspian species. A larger replacement has been under discussion for years.

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8. 

   8© Jesper Ahlin Marceta · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Ateshgah of Baku

   A temple at Surakhany built over a natural gas vent, where a flame burned out of the ground and drew Zoroastrian, Hindu and Sikh pilgrims from India along the Caspian trade routes. The natural fire failed in 1969 when the gas field was tapped, and the flame now runs off the mains.

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9. 

   9© Presidential Press and Information Office · CC BY 4.0

   Azerbaijan Carpet Museum

   The first museum in the world devoted to carpets, founded in 1967, and since 2014 in a building shaped like a rolled-up rug on the seafront. Azerbaijani weaving is divided into seven regional schools and the museum sets them out one by one, with looms working on the ground floor.

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10. 

    10© Sefer azeri · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Taza Pir Mosque

    A Shia mosque begun in 1905 and finished in 1914, conceived and paid for by Nabat Khanum Ashurbeyova, an Azerbaijani woman of the oil-boom generation who also founded schools. Its dome and minarets are gilded and it is the main Friday mosque of the city.

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Popular tickets & tours in Baku

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1. 

   1© Небати · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Bibi-Heybat Mosque

   A mosque over the grave of a woman held to be a descendant of the Prophet, on the shore south of the city. The Soviet authorities dynamited the medieval building in 1936; it was rebuilt from photographs in the 1990s and is now the most visited mosque in Azerbaijan.

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   Heydar Mosque

   A mosque opened in December 2014 in the Binagadi district, named after the former president and the largest in the Caucasus, with four minarets of nearly a hundred metres and room for several thousand worshippers.

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3. 

   3© Urek Meniashvili · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Martyrs' Lane

   A cemetery and memorial above the city, formerly Kirov Park, holding those killed by Soviet troops in the Black January of 1990 and the dead of the first Karabakh war. An eternal flame stands at the end of an avenue of identical black headstones.

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4. 

   4© Sefer azeri · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Holy Myrrhbearers Cathedral

   A church built in Baku in 1909 and now the seat of the Baku diocese. It is listed among Azerbaijan's immovable cultural properties of national importance, and served the city's Russian population through the oil boom.

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   Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

   The largest Russian Orthodox cathedral ever built in the south Caucasus, finished in 1898 with gilded domes that earned it the name of the golden church. Stalin's government demolished it in 1937 and a school now stands on the site.

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   6© Stomatoloq Fərid Zey… · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Azadliq Square

   The largest city square in Azerbaijan, beside the Baku seafront boulevard. It held Soviet military parades as Lenin Square, and from 1988 it filled with the crowds demanding independence; the rallies of that period are what the name now records.

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   7© Frokor · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Fountains Square, Baku

   A square in central Baku, formerly called Parapet and still widely known by that name. It takes its present name from the dozens of fountains first installed in the Soviet period, and the pedestrian streets around it are the centre of the city's evening.

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   Church of the Immaculate Conception

   The Catholic church of Baku. A church of the same dedication stood in the city from 1915 until the Soviet government demolished it in 1931; the present building was raised on a different site and consecrated in 2006.

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9. 

   9© M. PINARCI · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Baku Museum of Modern Art

   A museum of modern art opened in 2009, with over eight hundred works by Azerbaijani painters and sculptors since the mid-twentieth century. Its interior has no straight walls — the partitions are set at angles so that sightlines open across the whole floor.

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    10© shankar s. · CC BY 2.0

    Baku Museum of Miniature Books

    The only museum of miniature books in the world, opened in the walled old city of Icherisheher on 2 April 2002. In 2015 Guinness recognised it as the largest private collection of miniature books; several thousand volumes from more than sixty countries are shown, some smaller than a thumbnail.

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