Yerevan, Armenia: the pink tuff city, the Cascade and the mountain

The stone is the first thing to understand. The region's volcanic history left enormous deposits of tuff — a light, workable rock formed from consolidated ash — in colours running from pale cream through rose to a deep apricot-red, and Yerevan is faced in it almost throughout. Because it cuts easily and hardens on exposure, it suited large-scale building, and because the local quarries produce those particular tones, the result is a capital with a single palette. The effect is strongest at either end of the day, when low sun turns whole facades genuinely pink. The second half of the explanation is planning. In the 1920s Alexander Tamanian redrew the city on a radial-concentric plan: a green ring boulevard where the old walls had been, broad avenues radiating from a central square, and a deliberate architectural language that combined classical proportion with motifs drawn from medieval Armenian church carving — arcading, geometric borders, and the rosettes you will start noticing on ordinary apartment blocks once you look. Republic Square is the set piece: an oval of tuff buildings around a fountain basin, floodlit at night, and the single best place to stand and understand the city.

Yerevan's most striking single structure is the Cascade, an enormous stepped stairway climbing the hillside above the city centre — a monumental flight of terraces in pale tuff, with fountains and courtyards at each level, and, less obviously, a bank of escalators running up inside the structure for anyone who would rather not climb. It was begun as an urban composition linking the lower city to the heights and stood unfinished for a long period before being completed as a public art space: the terraces and the interior halls now hold a substantial modern sculpture collection, including several very large and very recognisable bronzes, all freely accessible from the steps. Below it, a garden of further sculpture runs down to the street. Climb or ride to the top in the late afternoon: from the upper terrace the whole city lies below in rose stone, and beyond it, on a clear day, the snow-capped double cone of Ararat rises across the plain. Haze often hides it in high summer, and autumn and spring mornings give the best odds — locals will tell you exactly which days are worth going up.

At the top of the main avenue stands the Matenadaran, a severe tuff building on a terrace, which holds one of the world's most important collections of manuscripts — tens of thousands of items, with Armenian codices at its core alongside Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian and Latin material, some of it surviving nowhere else. The displays are manageable rather than exhausting: illuminated gospels, medical and astronomical texts, and volumes of a size that had to be carried by two people. The reason it resonates is the script itself. Armenian is written in an alphabet devised in the early fifth century specifically for the language, by the scholar Mesrop Mashtots, and it is used for nothing else — thirty-eight letters, entirely distinct from Greek, Latin or Cyrillic, and immediately visible on every shopfront in the country. Knowing that changes how the city looks: the signage is not decorative, it is a writing system invented on purpose and continuously used for sixteen centuries. Ordinary visitors get more from the Matenadaran than they expect, and an hour is enough.

Armenian food is one of the strongest reasons to be here and it rewards eating locally rather than at hotels. The staple is lavash, a very thin unleavened bread baked by slapping the dough onto the inner wall of a clay tonir oven — it is on the intangible cultural heritage list, and it functions as bread, plate and wrapper at once. The centrepiece dish is khorovats, barbecue done seriously: pork, lamb or vegetables grilled over vine cuttings, with the vegetables charred and peeled into a smoky mash. Around them come dolma in vine or cabbage leaves, herb-heavy salads, salty string cheese, and a genuinely excellent range of fruit — the apricot is the national fruit and carries the country's name in its botanical one, and the pomegranate is on everything from tiles to jewellery. Two markets are worth an hour: the covered produce market for dried fruit, nuts, spices and sujukh, the walnut-and-grape-must sweet sold in ropes; and the weekend Vernissage, an open-air run of stalls with carpets, woodwork, silver and jewellery. Armenian brandy is the export the country is proudest of, and tastings are widely available.

Yerevan's surroundings hold architecture you will not see elsewhere, and the two obvious excursions combine easily into one day. Garni is a colonnaded temple on a promontory above a gorge — Hellenistic in form, the only such classical building standing in the region, reconstructed in the twentieth century from its own fallen stone. Below it, the gorge walls show a spectacular formation of vertical basalt columns, known locally as the symphony of the stones, reachable on foot or by vehicle down the valley. Twenty minutes further up the same valley, Geghard is a monastery complex partly built and partly carved directly into the cliff: several of its chambers are hollowed out of solid rock, including a chapel with a spring running through it and an upper chamber where the acoustics are extraordinary — visit when a choir is singing if you can. Both are UNESCO-listed. Further out, Lake Sevan sits at nearly two thousand metres, vast and startlingly blue, with a peninsula monastery at its northwestern corner and fish restaurants along the shore; it is a cool escape in high summer and a two-hour drive.

Zvartnots International (EVN) lies a short drive west of the centre and has good connections across Europe, the Gulf and the region. Once here, the centre is compact and best walked — the ring boulevard, Republic Square, the Cascade and the main avenue are all within twenty minutes of each other — and the small metro, with deep Soviet-era stations, covers the main axis cheaply. Taxis are inexpensive and app-hailed. On the season: this is a continental highland climate and the swings are wide. Summers are genuinely fierce, regularly pushing into the high thirties with dry heat and haze that hides the mountain, and the city empties into the hills. Winters are cold with snow, and the tuff city under it is beautiful. Spring and autumn are the answer — mild, clear, with the best chance of seeing Ararat and the produce at its peak, and September and October in particular are excellent. Bring layers whatever the month, because a thousand metres of altitude makes evenings cool even after a hot day.