Arg-e Bam

Arg-e Bam, the citadel of Bam, was for centuries a whole walled town built of earth, standing on the edge of the Lut desert in south-east Iran. Arg means citadel. Its origins are thought to reach back well over two thousand years, but most of what visitors saw before 2003 dated from the Safavid period, when Bam prospered on trade routes and on the dates and cotton of its oasis.

The town was built of khesht, sun-dried mud brick, and chineh, layers of packed earth. Within its walls were houses, a bazaar, a mosque, stables and barracks, rising in tiers to the governor's quarters at the top. From a distance it looked like a single sculpted hill.

On 26 December 2003 an earthquake struck Bam, killing more than 26,000 people and collapsing much of the citadel. The following year UNESCO inscribed Bam and its cultural landscape on the World Heritage list, and at once on its list of sites in danger, where it remained until 2013. Restoration teams, Iranian and international, have since rebuilt walls and towers using traditional earthen methods. A visit today is an unusual double experience: a historic town and a working site of repair, where fresh mud brick sits beside the old.