Gobustan National Park & Mud Volcanoes Tour

With our guide & driver you will drive to Gobustan National Reserve. Museum of Petroglyphs (outdoor museum) – Gobustan or by other name Museum of Petroglyphs (outdoor museum) located approximately 65 km from Baku. Prehistoric rock drawings – petroglyphs – are an art “archive” of the human evolution on Earth. The “articles” of such archives are the first transmissions from the human “I” to the outer world. There are a few of such outdoor “archives” in Azerbaijan. One of them, the largest, is located in Gobustan, at the Baku State Reserve of History, Ethnography and Arts, near Baku. It is a rocky massif on the bottom of the southeast part of the Great Caucasus Range, near the Caspian Sea and a modern highway built on the ancient Shirvan road.

Mud volcanoes are not really volcanoes at all but take their name from their resemblance to the molten-lava kind. Mud volcanoes come in all shapes and sizes and many are very small. Because they have no lava and rarely erupt, it’s safe to get up close. More than half the world’s mud volcanoes – about 300 in total – are found in Azerbaijan, and some of them are here in Gobustan.

Bibi-heybat mosque, built in 1990, is a restored version of the same mosque, built by the twenty-eighth ruler of the Shirvanshahs state, during the second half of XIII century by Azerbaijan’s Elkhanid state, by Abu Fath Farrukhzad ibn Akhsitan ibn Faiburz. The mosque, built by Mahmud ibn Sad, was completely destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1936 during the struggle against religion in the USSR .The rich interior of the complex was decorated with ornaments. The interior of the mosque is an oblong rectangular room with a lancet arch. Under the dome, there were chandelier-candlestick, and a hook on which it hung was surrounded by stained glass.