Four Seasons Baku
A bonus review for you today, online only: the Four Seasons Baku.
This one was meant to anchor a broader issue on the region, but plans shifted mid-trip. A couple of days into my stay, Iran sent drones toward an airport in Azerbaijan, and I decided to move on sooner than expected. Nothing further came of it, the incident stayed at the border and life in Baku carried on unbothered, but rather than hold the review indefinitely, I'm publishing it on its own.
And I'm so glad I went. Baku is one of the most genuinely surprising cities I've visited in years, a Caspian seafront, a walled medieval old town, Soviet grandeur, and Zaha Hadid curves all layered into something I haven't encountered anywhere else. The food alone is worth the trip: a confident, underrated cuisine sitting at the crossroads of Persian, Turkish, and Central Asian traditions, with saffron rice, lamb, pomegranate, and herbs doing remarkable things together. And the wines, Azerbaijan has a serious, centuries-old winemaking culture that almost no one outside the region talks about, and the local bottles were a real discovery.
Baku shouldn't work as a city break. It's a petrostate on the far side of the Caucasus that most people couldn't place on a map without googling it first, and yet it turns out to be one of the more genuinely surprising cities you can visit right now.
In one direction there's a UNESCO-protected old town of medieval lanes, caravanserais and palace walls that has survived largely intact. In another, a skyline with real architectural ambition, the three Flame Towers, the mesmerising Zaha Hadid designed Cultural Centre on the hillside, the Crescent development curving out . . .
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