Shiraz & Persepolis Highlights
A tour of Shiraz's poets' gardens, bazaars, and mosques, extending out to the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persepolis and its neighboring royal necropolises.
Trip Stops
- 1
This 13th-century poet's mausoleum sits beside a spring-fed pool where visitors traditionally toss coins for good luck, echoing the generosity that runs through Saadi's own verses. The current pavilion, rebuilt in 1952, has lines from his 'Gulistan' and 'Bustan' carved directly into its stone columns.
📍 Shiraz, Fars Province, Iran
- 2
The marble tomb of Iran's most beloved poet sits beneath a copper dome shaped like a dervish's hat, inscribed with his own verses. Many Iranians still practice 'Fal-e Hafez' here — opening his collected poems at random for a line of guidance — treating the ritual with almost as much reverence as the poetry itself.
📍 Shiraz, Fars Province, Iran
- 3
Built as the royal residence of Karim Khan Zand, founder of Iran's short-lived 18th-century Zand dynasty, this fortress-like citadel later served as a prison before its restoration into a museum. One of its four corner towers famously leans several degrees off vertical, the result of a bathhouse furnace that scorched its foundation stones.
📍 Shiraz, Fars Province, Iran
- 4
Commissioned by Karim Khan in the 1760s atop an 11th-century market, this cross-shaped bazaar was built with vaulted brick ceilings engineered to stay cool in summer and warm in winter. Its four grand entrances were once sealed at night, turning the entire market into a secure, self-contained trading city.
📍 Shiraz, Fars Province, Iran
- 5
Built alongside the bazaar it's named for, this mosque is known for its winter prayer hall, supported by 48 carved marble columns whose spiral fluting is unique in Iranian mosque architecture. Its tilework, added during a 19th-century Qajar restoration, uses a distinctive pinkish-red palette that predates the more famous Pink Mosque nearby.
📍 Shiraz, Fars Province, Iran
- 6
Nicknamed the 'Pink Mosque' for its rose-colored tiles, this 1888 building is best known for the stained-glass windows in its western prayer hall, which scatter kaleidoscopic patches of color across the floor for a couple of hours each morning. Arriving right at sunrise catches the effect at its most vivid before the light moves on.
📍 Shiraz, Fars Province, Iran
- 7
One of nine Persian gardens on UNESCO's World Heritage list, Eram (roughly 'paradise') traces its origins back at least to the 12th century. Its towering old cypress tree has become such a local icon that it appears on the back of Iran's 50,000-rial banknote.
📍 Shiraz, Fars Province, Iran
- 8
A modest cluster of four Sassanian rock reliefs carved in the 3rd century CE, this site depicts the investiture of early Sassanid kings by the god Ahura Mazda. It's often the first stop on the Persepolis day trip, a quiet preview of Persian relief-carving from centuries after Persepolis itself fell silent.
📍 Marvdasht, Fars Province, Iran
- 9
The ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, begun under Darius I around 518 BCE, Persepolis once hosted delegations from across the empire bringing tribute during Nowruz, all depicted in the famous stone reliefs of the Apadana staircase. Alexander the Great burned much of the complex in 330 BCE, an act ancient sources still debate as calculated revenge or a drunken accident.
📍 Marvdasht, Fars Province, Iran
- 10
This dramatic necropolis holds the rock-cut tombs of four Achaemenid kings, including Darius I, carved high into a cliff face a few kilometers from Persepolis. Its Sassanian reliefs include a famous scene of the Roman emperor Valerian kneeling in defeat before Shapur I — one of history's rare pieces of triumphal propaganda carved directly into stone.
📍 Marvdasht, Fars Province, Iran
- 11
The tomb of Cyrus the Great — founder of the Achaemenid Empire and author of one of history's earliest known charters of religious tolerance — has stood on this plain for roughly 2,500 years without mortar holding its stones together. Alexander the Great reportedly wept before it and ordered it restored after finding it looted during his conquest of Persia.
📍 Pasargadae, Fars Province, Iran
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