What is actually at Gobustan?

A reserve of 537 hectares among three hills about 60 kilometres south of Baku, holding more than 6,000 petroglyphs carved into limestone boulders — people, warriors, animals, dances, hunting scenes, camel caravans and boats — alongside caves, settlement remains and burial grounds used from the Upper Palaeolithic through to the Middle Ages.

What is a gaval dash?

A two-metre stone slab at Gobustan that produces a clear, tambourine-like note when struck with a smaller stone. It is one of the few things at the reserve you experience by ear rather than by eye, and guides will usually play it rather than just point at it.

How many mud volcanoes are there in Azerbaijan?

Around 350 have been recorded, which is one of the largest concentrations anywhere. Most are modest — roughly ten metres across — but the two largest in the world, Boyuk Kanizadag and Toraghay, are both Azerbaijani, and the difference between a cone you can step over and a hill you have to climb is worth knowing before you picture the field.

Why do some mud volcanoes catch fire?

Because what pushes the mud up is gas. Tectonic movement forces underground gas towards the surface, and where it escapes it can ignite and then burn continuously — the same mechanism behind the permanently burning hillside north of Baku, and the reason this whole landscape has been associated with fire for millennia.

Travel deep dive

Gobustan: Rock Art Above, Mud Volcanoes Below

Two of Azerbaijan's most distinctive sights sit within a short drive of each other on the same stretch of semi-desert south of the capital, and they turn out to have the same explanation. The gas and mud pressing up through this ground built the cones that bubble across the plain, and the boulder-strewn hills above them carry one of the densest collections of prehistoric carving anywhere in the Caucasus.

Updated 2026-09-19

More than 6,000 figures across three hills

The Gobustan State Reserve was established in 1966 and covers 537 hectares among the Boyukdash, Kichikdash and Jingirdagh hills, roughly 60 kilometres south of Baku. Its petroglyphs — more than 6,000 of them — are pecked and scratched into the faces of tumbled limestone boulders, and what makes the collection remarkable is less any single image than the range of them: people and warriors, animals, dances, hunting scenes, camel caravans, and boats that are among the reasons the site is read as a record of a coastline that has moved.

The carvings are not the only human trace here. The reserve also holds caves, settlement remains and burial grounds used from the Upper Palaeolithic through to the Middle Ages, which is the detail that reframes a visit: this was not a site people passed through once, but a place they returned to across a span of time long enough that the landscape itself changed around them.

A Roman line and a stone that rings

Two smaller features reward the walk more than most visitors expect. One is an inscription cut into a rock by a passing Roman soldier in the first century AD — the easternmost Roman inscription ever found, and a reminder of just how far the reach of the ancient Mediterranean world extended along these trade corridors. The other is the “gaval dash”, a two-metre slab of stone that rings with a clear tambourine-like note when struck with a smaller stone, and still gets played for visitors.

The gas underneath: Azerbaijan's mud volcanoes

A short drive from the rock art, the ground changes character entirely: low grey cones sit across an ash-coloured plain, some of them audibly working, pushing out cold mud rather than lava. Around 350 mud volcanoes have been recorded in Azerbaijan, one of the great concentrations anywhere in the world, and although the typical cone measures something like ten metres across, the largest — Boyuk Kanizadag and Toraghay, both in Azerbaijan — rise into genuine hills. They form where tectonic movement pushes underground gas towards the surface, carrying mud and water up with it, which is why they are more frequently active than conventional volcanoes despite being far smaller.

Some of that escaping gas ignites, and then simply keeps burning, which is the thread tying this plain to the flames on the Absheron peninsula around Baku and, some suggest, to the rise of fire worship in this region thousands of years ago. The mud-volcano area now has a visitor complex of its own, with an information centre covering how the cones work and the therapeutic properties claimed for the mud, natural-history and mineral displays, and quad-bike and buggy tours for anyone who would rather not cross the rough ground on foot.

This overview comes from Visaja's worldwide missions database (visaja.com), checked against official government sources; for binding answers, the mission itself always has the final word.