Bam and Its Cultural Landscape

At 5:26 in the morning on 26 December 2003, a 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck the city of Bam in southeastern Iran. The shaking lasted twelve seconds. In those twelve seconds, 26,200 people were killed, 75,000 were left homeless, and the largest adobe structure on earth collapsed. The Arg-e Bam, a citadel city of mud brick that had stood for at least two millennia, was reduced to rubble.

UNESCO had been preparing to add Bam to the World Heritage List. Instead, in 2004, it listed the site simultaneously on both the World Heritage List and the List of World Heritage in Danger. The simultaneous listing was unprecedented. What followed was also unusual: a slow, painstaking, internationally supported reconstruction project that took nearly two decades and grappled with a question conservation specialists rarely face so starkly. When a building made of mud collapses into mud, what exactly are you rebuilding?

Bam was removed from the Danger List in 2013, and today the citadel is open to visitors with a wooden walkway system designed to allow access without further stressing the fragile structures. Critically, UNESCO’s rules required that earthquake damage itself be treated as part of the site’s history. Sections of collapsed wall were deliberately left as found, integrated into the restoration rather than removed. The result is a site that carries the layered weight of its own destruction, which gives Bam a character quite different from immaculate heritage sites elsewhere.

The Arg-e Bam Before the Earthquake

Arg-e Bam is not simply a citadel. It was a city. The walled complex covers approximately six square kilometres and includes a fortress, residential quarters, a bazaar, caravanserais, mosques, a governor’s palace, and a Zoroastrian fire temple that predates the Islamic conquest of Iran. At its height during the Sassanid and early Islamic periods, from roughly the 7th to the 11th century CE, Bam sat at the intersection of trade routes running east to Central Asia and south to the Persian Gulf, and was known across the Islamic world for its cotton and silk textiles.

The mud-brick construction that defines the site is not merely a stylistic choice. The specific properties of the local soil, its plasticity when wet and hardness when dry, made adobe an extraordinarily practical building material in a desert climate. Buildings could be moulded into complex forms: arched vaults, domed ceilings, towers with stepped battlements. The city that resulted was architecturally sophisticated in ways that photographs do not fully convey, because the scale only becomes apparent standing inside it.

What Visitors See Today

The reconstruction has been largely completed. Around 99 percent of the stabilisation and restoration work is done, according to Iranian heritage authorities. The multi-lingual wooden walkway runs through the main zones of the citadel, allowing visitors to move through residential areas, the bazaar, the inner fortress, and the governor’s compound without compromising the fragile surfaces. Interpretation signage along the route is available in Persian and English.

Entry is open daily from approximately 07:00 to 17:30. The entrance fee for foreign visitors is in the range of 150,000 tomans (the fee schedule for Class A world heritage sites in Iran was revised in 2025). Confirm on arrival as prices are subject to change and local agents often have the most current figures.

The best time of day to visit is early morning, when the oblique light picks out the texture of the mud-brick surfaces and temperatures are manageable. Bam is in the Kerman desert; summer highs exceed 45 degrees Celsius, and midday in June or July inside a walled complex with limited shade is genuinely dangerous for the unprepared. Late autumn and early spring, from October through April, are strongly preferable.

Rayen Castle

Approximately 100 kilometres south of Bam, Arg-e Rayen is a comparable mud-brick citadel that also escaped the 2003 earthquake undamaged, since it sits on different geological ground. Rayen is consequently better preserved in its pre-earthquake condition than Bam and gives a useful point of comparison: the towers, the residential quarters, the mosque and the defensive walls are intact. Very few international visitors make it to Rayen because it requires a separate trip from Bam, but for anyone serious about adobe architecture the comparison between the restored Bam and the unrestored Rayen is instructive. Rayen is typically described as the second-largest mud-brick complex in the world, after Bam.

Shazdeh Garden

About 60 kilometres southeast of Kerman, Shazdeh Garden (also written Shahzadeh) is a 19th-century Persian garden that follows the classical four-part layout, with a central axis of water channels descending a hillside through a series of cascades and fountains, bordered by dense plantings of cypress, fruit trees and roses. The garden is UN-listed as part of the Persian Garden World Heritage inscription. In a landscape of bare desert hills, it functions as a shock of green that becomes more startling the longer you have been in the desert. The Qajar-era pavilions at the upper and lower ends retain their painted interiors.

Getting to Bam

Bam is accessible by road from Kerman, which has an airport with regular flights to Tehran. The distance from Kerman to Bam is approximately 195 kilometres and the drive takes around two hours on a reasonable road. Buses run between Kerman and Bam several times daily. Kerman itself has enough historical interest, including the exceptional Ganjali Khan complex and the National Carpet Museum’s regional collection, to justify spending a day there before continuing to Bam.

Iran’s internal transport network has improved considerably in recent years. Night trains from Tehran to Kerman operate on the main southeast line; the journey takes roughly twelve hours and arrives in the morning, which is a practical way to travel without losing a day to transport.

A Note on the Earthquake Heritage

The most defensible view is that what happened to Bam in 2003 is now inseparable from the site’s meaning. It is not possible to visit and ignore it, nor should you want to. The earthquake killed one in four of Bam’s residents in twelve seconds. The rebuilt city around the citadel is newer and in many ways more earthquake-resistant than before, following international rebuilding standards. But the citadel walls still show, in places, the raw edges of collapse frozen at the moment of shaking. That is what a heritage site in danger means when the danger was real. Visit with that awareness, and the citadel becomes one of the more affecting places in Iran.