Travel deep dive
Azerbaijan's Mountain Villages: Lahij to Khinalig
North of Baku the Greater Caucasus rises quickly, and the villages tucked into it are not variations on one another. Lahij has kept a craft, the Red Settlement above Guba has kept a community and a language, and Khinalig has kept a pattern of movement so intact that UNESCO listed the route as well as the village. Knowing which of those three interests you is the best way to decide how far up the mountains to go.
Updated 2026-09-19
Lahij: a copper town rather than a copper souvenir stall
Lahij lies about three hours' drive from Baku, the last stretch through a canyon spectacular enough to be part of the reason people come. The village is roughly two thousand years old, protected as a historical and cultural reserve, and built of stone along cobbled lanes with workshops opening directly onto them. More than forty crafts were once practised here — hat making, leather work, blacksmithing, carpet weaving among them — but Lahij's name was made by copper, sold across the Caucasus in its day and held now in some of the world's major museum collections.
What keeps this from being heritage theatre is that the craft is still organised the way it always was, in a division of labour specific enough that UNESCO lists it: a smelting master directs the work, an apprentice learns by assisting him, a hammerer drives air into the ovens and beats the smelted copper into thin plates, and a finisher polishes and engraves the piece, usually with motifs drawn from the natural world. The skill passes from father to son, and Azerbaijani families still travel to Lahij to buy copperware to cook in rather than to display. The village's own people are ethnic Tats, with their own language and their own dishes, and the cool air at this height makes the place a summer destination, with hiking routes climbing from the lanes.
Guba, its carpets, and the Red Settlement across the river
Guba, in the north-east, is the practical gateway to this part of the range and a weaving town of real standing: women here have made carpets for as long as the record goes back, and older Guba rugs now sit in collections as far away as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is also where Azerbaijan's regional cooking takes one of its odder turns — Guba's pakhlava is traditionally baked by men, an inversion of the usual division that locals enjoy explaining.
Directly opposite the town, across the Gudyalchay river, the Red Settlement is a village of red-tiled roofs founded in the middle of the eighteenth century under the protection of the Guba khanate and inhabited by Mountain Jews ever since. It is often described as the world's last surviving shtetl, and as the only entirely Jewish settlement outside Israel and the United States — claims the community and the tourism authorities both put carefully, as beliefs about the place rather than statistics. What is not in doubt is the continuity: the Juhuri language is still spoken, the synagogue is in use, and the Museum of Mountain Jews was the first anywhere devoted to the community's history.
Khinalig and the Köç Yolu: World Heritage for a way of moving
Khinalig sits 57 kilometres beyond Guba at more than two thousand metres, ringed by the peaks of Bazarduzu, Tufandag, Shahdag and Gizilgaya, with some five thousand years of settlement behind it. The slope is so steep that the houses are packed against one another and the roof of one serves as the courtyard of the house above — a structural solution you notice the moment you start walking uphill. Its people trace their descent from a tribe of ancient Caucasian Albania and speak Ketsh, a language of this village and nowhere else. The Juma Mosque stands at the highest point, with the mosques of Sheikh Shalbuz, Abu Muslim and Pir Jomard below it, and the village keeps an Ateshgah, a fire temple of its own.
The reason Khinalig became a World Heritage Site in 2023 is not the architecture but the herding. Families here still practise nomadic animal husbandry, moving flocks along the Köç Yolu, a historical migration route of roughly two hundred kilometres running between high summer pasture and lowland winter grazing, and the inscription covers the village, its surrounding grasslands, those winter pastures and the route itself. Visitors are drawn into it more gently than that makes it sound: households and local guides regularly invite people in for a tea table and samovar tea. Guided walks from Guba also reach the neighbouring villages of Griz, Galakhudat and Laza near Shahdag National Park, which is the way to see how many settlements share this landscape.