Abbasabad Garden

In the forested foothills of the Alborz, about nine kilometres from the town of Behshahr in eastern Mazandaran, lies the ruin of a royal garden built for Shah Abbas I. The shah, whose mother came from Mazandaran, spent much time in the Caspian provinces, and around 1612 he ordered a complex of gardens and buildings here, part of a chain of royal residences along the coast.

Abbasabad is unlike the desert gardens of central Iran. Instead of a walled oasis fed by a qanat, the underground channel of the plateau, it sits among green woods and uses a dam of stone and brick to hold back a lake. From the lake, water was carried down to a sequence of terraces, pools and channels, and the garden around them held a palace, a bathhouse, two brick towers and a watermill. Today the palace is a ruin of foundations and walls, but the lake remains, its surface reflecting the trees on the hills around it.

In 2011 Abbasabad was inscribed by UNESCO as one of nine gardens that together make up the World Heritage site of the Persian Garden, the only one of the group in the green Caspian north. Its inclusion shows how the Persian idea of the garden as an ordered paradise of water and trees could be adapted to a wholly different landscape.

Visitors come for the quiet as much as the history. In autumn, when the leaves turn and mist hangs over the water, the old dam and broken walls feel like a lost world in the forest.