Advisory - travel not recommended · checked 5 Aug 2026
Iran
Foreign ministries advise against all or all-but-essential travel to Iran. Several governments warn specifically that their dual nationals face a serious risk of arbitrary arrest and detention, and consular access to dual nationals is routinely refused. Standard scores are suspended while this alert is active.
Official advisory →Read the advisory first: foreign ministries advise against all or all-but-essential travel to Iran, several warn specifically that dual nationals face a serious risk of arbitrary arrest with consular access routinely refused, the twelve-day exchange of strikes with Israel in June 2025 showed how fast the airspace can shut with visitors inside it, and this route is published for the day that changes rather than as an invitation for today. It works only the central desert axis that is genuinely visited — Tehran, Kashan, Isfahan, Yazd, Shiraz and Persepolis — and it stays out of Sistan-Baluchestan, the Afghan and Iraqi border zones, the Kurdish and West Azerbaijan frontier districts and everything east of Bam, all of which the advisories name.
Tehran
Most arrivals land at Imam Khomeini in the small hours, so treat the first day as recovery and orientation. The National Museum, opened in 1937 to a design by the French architect André Godard, is the right opening move because it puts the rest of the route in order — Sialk, Persepolis and the Sasanian reliefs all appear here first, in fragments, before you meet them in the ground. Golestan Palace, the Qajar court complex world-listed in 2013, is twenty minutes away and is where nineteenth-century Iran decided what it wanted to look like.
Tehran, the bazaar and the hills
The Grand Bazaar is a working wholesale district rather than a display, and it has decided national politics more than once. The Treasury of National Jewels, held in the vaults of the central bank, opens on a short and shifting timetable and is worth arranging the day around: it holds the Darya-ye Noor, one of the largest cut pink diamonds known, and a globe made in 1869 from some thirty-four kilograms of gold and over fifty thousand stones. In the afternoon go north to the Sa'dabad or Niavaran palace grounds, where the last shah lived and where the temperature drops several degrees for every few hundred metres of altitude. One rule belongs here rather than in the small print, because the bazaar and the streets around it are where it bites: do not photograph a crowd, a government building, a checkpoint or a uniform, and if a street starts closing, leave it rather than watch.
South to Kashan
Out of the mountains and onto the plateau proper. Kashan sits on the edge of the Dasht-e Kavir and is built for it: the Borujerdi and Tabatabaei houses, both from the middle of the nineteenth century, are sunk into the ground around courtyards with windcatchers over them, which is a cooling system rather than a decorative motif. The Fin garden on the edge of town is fed by a spring, was inscribed in 2011 as one of the nine Persian Gardens, and is where the reforming chancellor Amir Kabir was murdered in the bathhouse in 1852. The Sialk mounds on the southern edge were first settled somewhere around the sixth millennium BC and occupied on and off ever since.
Abyaneh, then Isfahan
A driver day. Abyaneh sits at about 2,200 m (7,200 ft) on the flank of Karkas, built in red mud brick from the iron in the local soil, and its older residents still speak a dialect closer to Middle Persian than to modern Farsi. It is heavily visited and worth an hour rather than a morning. Then south-west across the plain to Isfahan, arriving late enough to walk into Naqsh-e Jahan after dark, when the square is full of families and the tilework is lit.
Naqsh-e Jahan
Abbas I moved his capital here in 1598 and laid out a rectangle roughly 160 by 510 metres with a palace on one side, a bazaar at one end and two mosques placed at angles to the square because Mecca is not where the geometry wanted it to be. The Shah Mosque took from 1611 to 1629; the Sheikh Lotfollah, finished around 1619, has no minaret and no courtyard because it was never a public mosque but the court's own chapel, and its dome is the single best interior in the country. UNESCO listed the square in 1979. Give the afternoon to the Jameh Mosque instead — a separate listing, twelve centuries of building in one structure, and two Seljuk brick domes that are the reason architects come here.
Jolfa and the dry river
Abbas I resettled Armenians from Julfa on the Aras in 1604 and gave them the south bank; the Vank cathedral they built between 1655 and 1664 has an Armenian plan under a Persian dome, frescoes inside and a printing press in the museum that ran from 1636. Walk back over the Si-o-se Pol, thirty-three arches, finished around 1602, and along to the Khaju bridge of about 1650, which was built as a weir with sluice gates as well as a crossing. For most of the year now there is no water under either of them, and people sit in the bed to talk. That absence is the subject of the article that goes with this route.
Meybod, Kharanaq and Yazd
East across the desert with stops. Meybod has a mud-brick citadel, a Safavid caravanserai, a domed yakhchal that made and stored ice through the summer before refrigeration, and a pigeon tower built to collect droppings for the fields. Kharanaq is a largely abandoned mud village with a minaret that visibly moves when pushed. Chak Chak, the Zoroastrian shrine cut into a cliff face, is a short detour off the same road. Reach Yazd in the evening.
Yazd
The old city was world-listed in 2017 and is the clearest surviving example of how a desert settlement was engineered: qanats bringing groundwater in by gravity, covered cisterns storing it, windcatchers driving air over it to cool the rooms above, and mud brick doing the rest. The Amir Chakhmaq façade and the Jameh Mosque, whose minarets are the tallest in the country, are the set pieces. The Ateshkadeh keeps a Zoroastrian flame that the community dates to the fifth century, and the Towers of Silence on the southern edge were in use for exposing the dead until the practice was ended in the 1960s. The water museum, in a merchant house with a qanat running under it, is a small building that explains the entire plateau.
Abarkuh and Pasargadae
The longest driving day on the route and there is no shorter way to reach Pasargadae: about 550 km (340 mi) south-west across the Fars uplands. Abarkuh has a cypress that local tradition ages at several thousand years and an ice house beside the road. Late in the afternoon the plain opens at Pasargadae, where Cyrus built a capital of scattered pavilions in a garden rather than a citadel, and where his tomb — six stepped courses and a small gabled chamber, world-listed in 2004 — stands alone in the grass with nothing built around it.
Shiraz
A city that organises itself around poets and gardens. The Nasir al-Mulk mosque of 1888 is photographed to death for the light through its coloured glass and is better at eight in the morning than in any of those pictures. The Vakil bazaar and mosque are Zand-period work of the 1760s, when Shiraz was briefly the capital. The tombs of Hafez and Sa'di are not monuments so much as places where people read aloud to each other; the Hafez pavilion as it stands was rebuilt in 1935 by the same André Godard who designed the museum in Tehran.
Persepolis and Naqsh-e Rostam
Darius I began Persepolis around 518 BC on a terrace cut into the hillside, and Alexander burned it in 330 BC — the fire is why the carved reliefs on the Apadana stair survive, because the collapsing cedar roofs buried them. It was inscribed in 1979. Six kilometres north-west at Naqsh-e Rostam, four Achaemenid kings are buried in cruciform tombs cut high into a cliff, and beneath them the Sasanians carved their own reliefs across a gap of some seven hundred years, including Shapur I with the Roman emperor Valerian, captured in 260. Go early; there is no shade on the terrace at any hour.
North and out
The Vakil bazaar in the morning for whatever you did not buy, then the airport. Shiraz to Tehran takes under two hours in the air and about twelve on the ground, and if you would rather not fly — see the note below about the age of the domestic fleet — the overnight VIP bus is genuinely comfortable and the train is better still. Build a full day of slack before an international departure: schedules here move for reasons that are not published.
Good to know
Start with the advisory, because it governs your insurance and, for some readers, a great deal more. Foreign ministries advise against all or all-but-essential travel to Iran, and several warn specifically that dual nationals face a serious risk of arbitrary arrest and that consular access to them is routinely refused. That warning is not decorative. Iran does not recognise dual nationality: if you hold Iranian citizenship by descent — including if you have never claimed it, never held the passport and have never been to the country — the authorities may treat you solely as an Iranian citizen, may require you to enter and leave on an Iranian passport, may hold you liable for military service, and will refuse your other government any access to you if something goes wrong. If that describes you or anyone travelling with you, take specific legal advice before you so much as start a visa application. Within the country the advisories name particular ground: Sistan-Baluchestan province, the belt within roughly 100 km of the Afghan border, the strip within 10 km of the Iraqi border, the districts of Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan near the Turkish and Iraqi frontiers, and everything east of the line from Bam to Jask. This route goes to none of it, and it still runs against the advice of most ministries. Check your own the week you travel, not the month you book.
Escalation is the risk that overtakes all the others without notice. In June 2025 Israel and Iran fought a twelve-day exchange of air and missile strikes, the United States struck three nuclear sites, and Iranian airspace closed within hours and reopened only in stages over the following weeks. There were no evacuation flights: the governments that got their nationals out moved them by road to Armenia, Azerbaijan or Türkiye, and others told their citizens to shelter in place. Casualty counts for those days are disputed, with the official Iranian figures and the independent tallies far apart, and no reliable single number exists. A ceasefire has held since, nothing underneath it is settled, and the wave of arrests that followed the war — foreign and dual nationals among them, on espionage accusations — is why several ministries hardened their advice afterwards rather than easing it. Plan on the assumption that the way out can close while you are inside: know which land border you would use, keep a printed copy of your documents, and do not travel on a schedule with no slack in it.
Visas run on an authorisation code rather than a form. A licensed agency or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues a grant number, and only then do you collect the visa at an embassy or, for eligible passports, on arrival. British, American and Canadian passport holders cannot travel independently at all: the rule is a state-approved guide for the entire stay, arranged through a licensed agency, and it is applied rather than winked at. Any Israeli stamp, visa or other evidence of a visit to Israel is grounds for refusal at the desk. In the other direction, and this is the consequence people most often fail to price in, a visit to Iran at any time since March 2011 permanently disqualifies you from the United States visa-waiver programme — ESTA will not work again and you will need a full US visa for every future trip, including a change of planes.
Money is the thing that catches everybody. Sanctions mean no foreign card functions anywhere in Iran: not Visa, not Mastercard, not your bank's cash card, not a phone wallet, not a wire transfer. You bring the entire cost of the trip in cash — clean, untorn, high-denomination euros or dollars — and change it at an exchange office rather than a bank. Prepaid rial cards sold to visitors and loaded with cash on arrival work in hotels and shops and are worth the trouble simply so that you are not carrying the whole trip in a money belt. Prices are spoken in tomans, which are ten rials, while the banknotes are printed in rials; parliament approved dropping four zeros and renaming the currency the toman, the change has moved slowly, and you will be doing the arithmetic in your head for the entire trip. Ask which unit a price is in, every time.
Insurance is the second underestimated cost. An ordinary policy is void in a country your government advises against travelling to, and it will not tell you that when you buy it — it will tell you at the point of claim. Many insurers also exclude Iran outright on sanctions grounds, because they could not lawfully settle a claim inside the country. Specialist cover exists from a small number of underwriters and runs to a few hundred euros for a fortnight; read the medical evacuation clause first, since that is the one that matters and the one most often carved out. Separately, Iran requires foreign visitors to hold an Iranian-issued travel medical policy, sold cheaply at the airport and by visa agencies. It satisfies an entry requirement. It does not replace the specialist policy.
Dress and conduct: hijab is legally compulsory in public for women, foreign visitors included — a headscarf, and clothing loose enough to cover the arms and hips; men wear long trousers. Enforcement has fluctuated sharply since the protests of 2022 — a harsher enforcement bill passed by parliament in 2023 was shelved before it took effect — but the underlying requirement has never been lifted, so the practical advice is to comply and to take your cue from local women rather than from a photograph you saw online. Alcohol is illegal. Do not photograph military sites, government buildings, airports, police or any gathering that looks like a protest, and do not argue the point.
Connectivity is filtered and occasionally switched off. A great many international services are blocked outright, nationwide shutdowns have happened during unrest, and you should not plan on being reliably reachable. Buy a local SIM at the airport with your passport, and tell people at home in advance that silence is not information.
Season and calendar decide comfort. The plateau is desert with a continental winter: April to early June and late September to early November are the workable windows, Yazd sits above 40 °C (104 °F) through the summer with Shiraz not far below it, and Tehran and Isfahan are properly cold in January. Nowruz, around 20 March, moves the entire country for a fortnight and fills every hotel and road in it. During Ramadan restaurants close in daylight hours, and during Muharram the mourning processions take over whole city centres — worth seeing, not worth being surprised by.
Finally, transport. Decades of sanctions have kept Iran out of the new-aircraft market and the domestic fleet shows it, which is a fair reason to prefer the ground. The trains are good — the Trans-Iranian Railway was world-listed in 2021 — and the intercity VIP buses run three seats to a row and cost very little. Where this route uses a flight, a night train or a bus will do the same job.
Shorter or longer?
North from Tehran instead of straight home: the Alamut valley and the ruins of the Assassin castles above Qazvin, then over the Alborz to Masuleh, a village stacked so steeply that the roofs are the streets, and Rasht for the food — a UNESCO city of gastronomy since 2015, sour and herb-heavy and nothing like the plateau's. The Hyrcanian forests along the coast are a relic broadleaf woodland that survived the last glaciation and were world-listed in 2019. None of it falls inside the regions the advisories rule out by name, which is not the same as being outside the advisory — the country-wide advice covers Gilan and Qazvin like everywhere else. The temperature drops about fifteen degrees on the far side of the mountains.
Tehran, Isfahan, Yazd and Shiraz with Persepolis, linked by train and one domestic flight. Cuts Kashan, Abyaneh, Meybod, Kharanaq and Pasargadae, and removes the eight-hour driving day between Yazd and Shiraz, which is the part of this route people find hardest.