Baku

Baku's medieval core is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, ringed by twelfth-century walls and still home to a few thousand residents, which is what keeps it from feeling like an exhibit: the alleys hold galleries, tea rooms, restaurants and rooftop bars alongside the monuments. The Maiden Tower anchors the quarter and remains genuinely unexplained — neither its date of construction nor its original purpose is settled, and the competing theories are half the pleasure of standing under it. The fifteenth-century Shirvanshahs' Palace, the other UNESCO-cited monument here, is a whole complex rather than a single building, taking in a mosque, a mausoleum, a hammam, a divankhana, gates and a reservoir. Two smaller collections reward the detour: the Museum of Miniature Books, whose holdings include the smallest book in the world at two millimetres square, and the Marionette Theatre, which stages Uzeyir Hajibeyli's Leyli and Majnun and The Cloth Peddler.

When Baku's oil industry took off in the late 1800s the city grew fast, and the money went into mansions and public buildings that formed a whole new ring around the Old City walls. The style is deliberately eclectic — Gothic, Baroque, Neoclassical and Art Nouveau elements often on the same façade — and much of it was designed by European architects, with a group of Polish architects leaving a particularly strong mark on how the centre looks today. It earned the city the nickname “the Paris of the Caucasus”, and the buildings were largely overlooked through the Soviet decades until local historians researched them back into view; architectural walking tours of the district are now one of the better ways to spend a morning here.

The three Flame Towers are the silhouette everyone recognises, flame-shaped and set high enough to be visible from almost anywhere in the city — one holds a hotel, the other two apartments and offices, and after dark their façades carry some 10,000 LEDs that animate a rising flame across all three. The Seaside Boulevard and Highland Park are where photographers go for them. Inland, Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Centre opened in 2012 as a building with no straight line anywhere in it, and won the London Design Museum's Design of the Year award in 2014; inside are a museum devoted to its namesake, a Mini Azerbaijan exhibition of the country's landmarks in miniature and, unexpectedly, a classic car collection, all set in a large park. Formula 1 races a street circuit through these same streets and past the Old City walls, an unusual pairing of motorsport and World Heritage.

The Seaside Boulevard is the city's promenade and its social barometer, running for kilometres along the Caspian with parks, cafés and a Ferris wheel, and it is where Baku goes in the evening. Halfway along it stands a building shaped like a half-unrolled carpet: the Carpet Museum, designed by the Austrian architect Franz Janz and opened in 2014, though the institution itself dates from 1967. It holds the largest collection of Azerbaijani carpets anywhere — over 6,000, with the displayed pieces mostly from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries — arranged so that the country's seven regional weaving schools can be told apart, and live weaving demonstrations show how the knots go in. Azerbaijani carpet weaving has been on UNESCO's intangible heritage list since 2010, and in some rural regions it is still taught orally within families.

The peninsula around the city is where Azerbaijan's fire reputation is literal. At Yanar Dag, in the village of Mammadli, natural gas escaping through a hillside burns continuously in flames that sometimes reach ten metres, first described in Marco Polo's memoirs in the thirteenth century and now fronted by a museum complex; the surrounding reserve also holds the Wolf's Den cave, medicinal sulphur springs, an active mud volcano and ancient burial mounds. At Surakhani, the Ateshgah temple marks an older sacred-fire site that became a place of worship for visitors from India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was written up by Alexandre Dumas in his 1858 “Journey to the Caucasus”, and has been on Azerbaijan's UNESCO tentative list since 1998; Indian visitors still come, and the complex works as an open-air museum. The same peninsula carries the city's beaches — Bilgah, Mardakan, Pirshagi, Nardaran and Zagulba are the quieter ones — plus a kitesurfing lagoon at Shuraabad.

Baku's metro is fast and cheap, with two lines crossing the centre — the Red Line from Icherisheher to Hazi Aslanov and the Green Line from Khatai to Darnagul — running from around six in the morning until midnight, with trains every two to three minutes. Payment is by prepaid card or QR ticket, and contactless payment works at every station; the network is being extended, so it is worth checking current service rather than an old map. Buses are inexpensive and post their schedules at the stops, licensed taxi firms work the whole city and international ride-hailing apps operate here too. The Old City and the Boulevard are best walked, and the Absheron fire sites are the one group of sights that genuinely needs a taxi or a tour rather than the metro.