Yanardag, the hillside that has burned for decades on Absheron: what it really is, why it does not go out, the new museum and how to see it at night from Baku

In Mammadli, a village on the Absheron peninsula 25 km from Baku, among stone houses, oil wells and waste ground, there is a grey sandstone hillside that burns: at the foot of the slope, along some ten metres, flames of half a metre to a metre rise, blue below and orange above, which neither rain nor wind puts out and which have been burning, as far as anyone knows, since the 1950s. This is Yanardag, the burning mountain, the image with which Azerbaijan presents itself as the land of fire, and it is a small place, a little strange and much better at dusk, when the fire really shows and the heat reaches your face. This guide tells what it is, what it is not, what is in the visitor centre and how to go and combine it with Ateshgah in half a day.

Why it burns

The Absheron peninsula sits on a gas and oil field so shallow that gas escapes through the cracks of the porous rock, and where it finds a continuous outlet and someone lights it, it burns without stopping as long as the gas keeps coming; at Yanardag the sandstone of the hillside acts as the chimney of a pocket of gas, and the strip of fire is where it comes out. Local history says a shepherd lit it by accident in the 1950s, with a cigarette or a campfire, and that it has not gone out since; there were other flames like it across the peninsula, and most went out when the extraction around them took away their gas, as happened at the Ateshgah temple in 1969. The flames are half a metre to a metre high, and on rainy days the water hisses as it falls on the hot stone.

What it is not

It is not an eternal fire from antiquity: no document says this hillside burned before the 20th century, and what Marco Polo described in the 13th century, a spring from which an oil came that burned, was the oil of the region, not this spot. Nor is there evidence that Zoroastrians made pilgrimage here, although they venerated the natural flames of Absheron in general, and the temple that did exist, built by Hindus, is at Surakhani, on the other side of the peninsula. What Yanardag is, is the only place around Baku where fire comes out of the ground without a pipe, which is already a lot, and the reason for the name land of fire that the country uses for everything.

The visitor centre

The site has been a state historical, cultural and natural reserve since 2007, and in 2019 an enclosure with a visitor centre was built around it: a museum with panels on gas, oil and fire in the culture of Azerbaijan, a projection room, a tiered amphitheatre facing the hillside to sit and watch the fire, a shop and a café with a terrace. There is also a small display on the other fires of the peninsula and on the mud volcanoes of Gobustan. Even so, the visit is half an hour, an hour if you wait for dark, which is what you should do: in daylight the flame is a glow on the rock, and at night it is what the photograph promises.

How to get there and how to combine it

It is 25 km north-east of Baku, at Mammadli, half an hour by app taxi, which is the most comfortable way, asking the driver to wait or returning with another from the entrance; by public transport you take the metro to Koroglu and from the bus station beside it a city bus stops at Mammadli, ten minutes' walk from the enclosure. It opens every day until night and charges a small fee that includes the museum. The usual thing is to link it with the Ateshgah fire temple at Surakhani, on the other side of the peninsula, half an hour by car, doing Ateshgah in the afternoon with daylight and Yanardag at dusk, with the car hired for both; by public transport it is two different buses from Koroglu and a whole afternoon.

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