Day 01: Arrival Baku

Arrival to Baku, meeting at the airport. Transfer to the hotel.

Check in at hotel.

Lunch in Maharaja restaurant.

After lunch walking at Boulevard, visiting Ferris Wheel. Dinner in Adam’s Curries restaurant.

Overnight.

Day 02: City Tour

Breakfast at the hotel.

Baku city tour

Icheri Sheher (Old City), known as a “fortress” – is a unique historical and architectural conservation area in the center of Baku. This is one of the ancient and densely populated places of the country and even of the Middle East. Archaeological excavations revealed burial vaults of the Bronze Age. The Maiden Tower (the 12th century) and the Shirvanshah palace (the 13th-16th century) are well-known historical monuments also locate in Old City.

Besides them there are a lot of other unique monuments of Icheri Sheher: mosques, minarets, the remnants of caravanserais "Multani" and "Bukhara", ancient baths. There are a lot of souvenir shops where you can purchase national clothes, kerchiefs, scarves and caps, dishes and handmade carpets.

Walking down to Nizami Street (old trading zone with lots of shops and boutiques), Fountain Square shopping center “Park Boulevard”, etc.

Lunch in Salam Aleykum restaurant.

Baku panorama viewing with the Upland Park, and have the opportunity to look at Baku hotel complex

«Flame Towers Baku» – a new business card of the city. The famous Flame Tower complex composed of 3 buildings. It is interesting that lighting of Flame Towers is considered to be the best in the world, according to the survey of skyscrapercity.com. The surface of the Towers is fully covered with LED screens which reflect different visual characters in motion, easily visible from the far corners of the city. Dinner in Taj Mahal restaurant.

Returning back to Hotel Overnight.

Day 03 :Gala Village Tour

Breakfast at the hotel.

Visiting Azerbaijan's historical ethnographic reserve - the ancient village Gala. Gala village is in the center of the Absheron peninsula in the east of Azerbaijan, on a strategically important hill which dominated the area. The older part of Gala village was declared to be a historical ethnographic reserve in 1988 and encompassed 216 historical, archaeological and architectural monuments. The village has

five mosques, the remains of a castle, three bathhouses, more than 170 houses, as well as mausoleums, vaults, storage lakes etc. Gala village is not, however, just a collection of

monuments illustrating medieval architecture, but a complex simulating a town built in medieval Absheron. It is a rural metaphor for the Inner City and fortress at the center of Baku.

There used to be four mehella-quarters in the village, called Balaverdi, Hadji Ramazan, Chemberekend and Terekeme. Each quarter had a central mosque, a square in front of the mosque and streets radiating out from the square; this is even indicated in the name of one of the quarters - Chemberekend-Obruch – (Chemberekend-Ring – ed.) in which the system of building a quarter with circular and radial streets, and its enclosure, transformed the quarter into a fortress.

The territory of 1.2 ha hosts old-time houses – portable tents made of animal skins, subsequently replaced by stone and beaten cobworks with cupolas, an ancient blacksmith shop, market, pottery, bakery, threshing mill and other interesting medieval buildings. You can see, touch, and take picture of all of them. You can even try to bake bread in a common oven, weave a carpet, muddy in pottery or feed camels, horses and donkeys, peacefully resting in their stalls.

Many monuments and exhibits were brought to the Gala Museum from different corners of the Absheron Peninsula; they were renovated or fully

reconstructed. All together, they help to get an idea of the life of the medieval people in Azerbaijan.

It is interesting to know that scientists have found the evidence showing that the first settlements on the site of Gala village appeared much earlier, at least 5,000 years ago rather than in the Middle Ages. Rare exhibits of antiquity as well as cave paintings of primitive people with pictures of

hunting and ritual sacrifice, also found their place in the richest museum exposition. The Gala Museum territory hosts also several exhibitions, where the tourists can see ancient household items, glassware, jewelry and other interesting exhibits cased in glass.

Visiting an ancient Zoroastrian temple of flame – Ateshgah. The temple ages back to the 17-18th centuries and was built by Indian fire-worshipers’ community in Baku.

Lunch in Ateshgah restaurant.

Visiting Burning Mountain. Burning flame outlets at the surface where Yanardag is located. The word "Yanar" in Azeri language means "burning", and "Dagh" - "mountain". And this is real a burning mountain - not metaphorically, but literally. Once in Absheron it had been a lot of places where natural gas coming out from the earth to the surface ignited spontaneously, but with the start of mass extraction of oil and gas in Absheron these places started to disappear. At present, it is the only place of this unique natural phenomenon - the output of natural gas to the surface.

After arrival to Baku free time for shopping with car and guide at disposal (28 of Mall, Ganjlik Mall, Park Bulvar entertainment centers, Yashil Bazaar (Green Market).

Gala Dinner with belly dance show and DJ in Chanaggala restaurant. Returning back to Hotel

Overnight.

Day 04: Departure

Breakfast at the hotel. Check out from hotel.

Transfer from Hotel to Airport. Departure.