Gobustan National Park, Museum and Mud Volcanoes

The Gobustan National Historical and Art Reserve, located 70 km south of Baku is a unique monument of world importance and in 2007 was included to the UNESCO World Heritage List. On the territory of the reserve with a total area of 4,537 hectares is concentrated one of the world's largest collections of ancient rock paintings - there are more than 4000 thousand petroglyphs covering the period from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages. In the Gobustan National Historical and Art Reserve you can also see the settlements of ancient people, the remains of a large prehistoric cromlech, barrows and other evidence of material and non-material culture of the Stone Age period and subsequent periods. The Gobustan petroglyphs were repeatedly explored by the famous Norwegian explorer and traveler Thor Heyerdahl, who recognized the cave images of boats present there as the oldest known boat image in the world.

Gobustan Museum was opened in 2012 after a thorough reconstruction. Today it is a modern interactive museum complex in the collection of which are collected over 100,000 archaeological materials.

In 2013 the reserve museum became one of the winners of the contest "The Best European Museum of the Year", which is held by the European Museum Forum and is one of the most prestigious competitions in the world in this field.

There are 850 mud volcanoes in the world, and over 300 of them are in Azerbaijan. Most are located on Absheron, around Baku. There are 100 near the Gobustan reserve alone. Azerbaijan is also unique because it has all kinds of mud volcano, making it possible to study various aspects of mud eruptions. There are active, dormant, buried and subsea volcanoes in Azerbaijan, as well as those on islands and spewing oil. For instance, there are many subsea mud volcanoes around the Baku archipelago. The Goturdag volcano in Gobustan is the only mud volcano of its kind – it has been issuing mud for 100 years. They are also renowned for its healing qualities which is very popular both among foreigners and local people. They use it either for bathing or as a mask for face.