Отобранное впечатление · Баку
Баку, АзербайджанМгновенное Подтверждение
Wells were drilled industrially on this shoreline in the 1840s and the fields once produced half the world's oil; everything on this route was paid for by the second boom.
A short format that fits between other plans
Buildings put up within living memory, not centuries ago
Parks and open ground along the shoreline
Viewpoints back across the bay
Collection and return at your hotel
A way to work out what deserves a longer look
A short tour of modern Baku, two to three hours with pickup from your hotel, taking in the Heydar Aliyev Centre, the Modern Art Museum, the seafront parks and the viewpoints over the bay.
Baku was the first great oil city in the world. Wells were being drilled industrially on this shoreline in the 1840s, more than a decade before the strike in Pennsylvania that usually gets the credit, and by 1900 the fields around the town were producing roughly half the planet's oil.
That first boom built the old centre. The Nobel brothers ran their operation from here, the Rothschilds financed a rival, and the fortunes went into the heavy stone mansions you pass on the way in from the older part of town, put up by men who had been peasants twenty years earlier.
Then it went. Revolution, then a Soviet oil industry that ran the fields hard and left them tired, then decades in which Baku was a provincial city on an inland sea.
The second boom starts with a contract signed in 1994 that reopened the Caspian to foreign capital. Everything you will look at on this tour — the towers, the seafront, the centre with no straight lines in it — was paid for by that.
The Heydar Aliyev Centre is the piece most people come to see, and it deserves the stop.
It was designed by Zaha Hadid and finished in 2012, and its whole point is the refusal of the straight line: the roof, the walls and the ground fold into one another as a single continuous surface, so it is genuinely difficult to say where the building ends and the plaza begins. It won a major international design award in 2014, the first time that prize had gone to a woman.
Walk the outside rather than photographing the front. The shape only makes sense as you move around it.
Two to three hours will not give you the old walled city, the museums or the ancient parts of the region. That is not what this is.
It suits an afternoon between other things, a stopover, or a first orientation on arrival — after which you will know which parts you want to come back to properly.
Pickup and drop-off at your hotel are part of the arrangement, so the timing works around where you are staying.
Admissions are not included: this is a tour of the outsides of buildings and the spaces between them, unless your own booking says otherwise. Check before you go if getting inside the centre matters to you.
Much of it is walking in the open along the shore, which is exposed. In summer the heat here is serious, and in winter the wind off the Caspian is worse than the temperature suggests.
Откройте, чтобы выбрать дату и рассчитать цену.
Что покрывает цена и что стоит заложить отдельно.
Практические детали и ответы на те вопросы, которые действительно задают.
In the 1840s — industrial wells were working on this shore before the American strike normally credited as the first.
Around the turn of the twentieth century they accounted for something close to half of world output.
Among others the Nobel brothers, who ran their company from the city, with Rothschild money behind a competitor.
Into heavy stone mansions in the older districts, built by men who had been peasants a couple of decades earlier.
Politics first, then exhaustion — by the later Soviet decades the wells were producing a fraction of their old share.
A contract signed in 1994 that opened the Caspian to foreign investment again.
An Iraqi-British architect whose practice specialised in exactly this kind of curved, seamless construction.
There are effectively no straight lines: roof, wall and ground run into each other as one surface.