Iran

A morning arrival, and you start in north Tehran where the air is cooler and the Alborz mountains sit above the city. The Saadabad Complex is eighteen palaces in a wooded park, the summer seat of the Qajars and then the Pahlavis, abandoned at speed in 1979 and preserved more or less as it stood. The Time Museum follows: a Qajar mansion turned over to clocks and the history of measuring time, and one of the most photogenic buildings in the city. Then Tajrish Bazaar, which is where north Tehran shops rather than where tourists go. Overnight Tehran.

Down into old Tehran for the city's headline act. Golestan Palace, UNESCO-listed, is the Qajar dynasty at full volume: mirror halls, painted tile, marble thrones, and the room where Iran's first photographs were made by a shah who was an enthusiastic photographer himself. The National Museum of Iran next, for the long view from Susa and Elam through Persepolis to the Islamic centuries. Before lunch, the Gate of the National Garden and the Foreign Ministry palaces where visiting heads of state are still received. The afternoon belongs to the Grand Bazaar: ten kilometres of covered lanes, and the commercial heart of the country. Overnight Tehran.

A stop under the Azadi Tower on the way out, then south to Kashan, a small desert city that was made extremely rich by carpets and silk, and spent the money on houses. The Tabatabaei and Borujerdi houses are the two finest: sunken courtyards, wind towers, stained glass and plasterwork commissioned by nineteenth-century merchants trying to out-build each other, and reportedly built by the same architect for a bride and her father. You go up onto the roof of the Sultan Amir Ahmad bathhouse for the domes-and-badgirs view, and finish at the Fin Garden, UNESCO-listed, fed by a spring that has run its channels without a pump since the sixteenth century. Overnight Kashan.

On to Isfahan, and straight into the square. Naqsh-e Jahan, the Image of the World, laid out by Shah Abbas in 1598 as the stage set of an empire: UNESCO-listed, second-largest public square on the planet, and holding the Ali Qapu palace, the Sheikh Lotfollah with its shifting rose dome, and the great Shah Mosque. The handicraft arcades around the edges are still working workshops (miniature painters, tile cutters, coppersmiths) and worth as much of your time as the monuments. The evening is the Isfahan Music Museum: three hundred instruments from across the country and an intimate live performance. Overnight Isfahan.

A slower Isfahan day, away from the square. Mollabashi House is a restored Qajar mansion of fine detail and one of the best interiors in Iran to photograph. Then across to Jolfa, the Armenian quarter the Safavids created by moving an entire population of craftsmen here, and Vank Cathedral at its centre, Christian frescoes running above Persian tilework in a single continuous room, which tells you most of what you need to know about how Isfahan worked. The evening is for the Zayandeh Rud bridges: Si-o-se-pol with its thirty-three arches and Khaju, where people gather under the arcades in the evening and, often enough, someone starts singing.

East of Isfahan the cultivation gives out and the dunes begin. Varzaneh is a small desert town with its own oddity (the women here wear white chadors rather than black, a local tradition nobody has fully explained) and a set of historic buildings and salt lakes around it. The afternoon is the dunes themselves, with off-road driving and ATVs available for anyone who wants them. Tonight is deliberately not a hotel: you stay in a traditional desert ecolodge, mud-brick and low-slung, for the silence and a sky with nothing in the way of it. One of the two nights on this route we would not swap for a five-star room.

Out of the desert and east along the old caravan road toward Yazd, breaking at Meybod. The circular pigeon house there was built to hold several thousand birds and existed purely to harvest their droppings for fertiliser, a piece of agricultural engineering far more beautiful than it needed to be. Narin Castle sits above the town, a mud-brick fortress with pre-Islamic foundations and a rampart walk that lays out the whole oasis and its qanat-fed fields. Into Yazd in the late afternoon, in time to walk the old city while the lanes are still warm and the wind towers catch the last of the light.

The oldest continuously inhabited mud-brick city on earth, and the only historic fabric in Iran that UNESCO listed in its entirety. The Jameh Mosque and its portal carry the tallest tiled minarets in the country; Amir Chakhmaq Square and its tiered alcoves are the picture everyone takes home. Dowlat Abad Garden is another of the nine UNESCO Persian gardens, sitting beneath the tallest wind tower in the world. Then the Towers of Silence on the edge of town, where Zoroastrians once exposed their dead rather than defile earth or fire. The afternoon: a zurkhaneh session (drums, chanting, and the ritual gymnastics of the House of Strength) and the Atash Behram, whose flame has burned unbroken for over fifteen hundred years.

South-east to Kerman, a city very few visitors reach and the gateway to Iran's emptiest quarter. The Ganjali Khan complex at its centre is a complete seventeenth-century civic block (bathhouse, caravanserai, mint, water reservoir and school) arranged around a square and still stitched into the working bazaar around it. The bathhouse is now a museum, its vaulted chambers painted and peopled with waxworks, and its ceilings are the reason to go. The rest of the bazaar is a local one: spices, copper, cumin, and none of it arranged for you. Overnight Kerman.

Early to Mahan, where the Shazdeh Garden (the Prince's Garden, another of the nine UNESCO gardens) steps down a hillside in terraced fountains with raw desert on every side of its walls, which is the entire Persian idea of paradise made literal. The shrine of Shah Nematollah Vali next, with its turquoise dome and old cypresses. Then east to Shahdad and into the Dasht-e Lut, the first natural site in Iran that UNESCO inscribed: the hottest land surface ever recorded, wind-carved into kaluts, ridges that run in ranks for a hundred and fifty kilometres. You go out by camel before sunset, when the whole formation turns molten. Overnight Shahdad.

West into the hills of Kerman province to Maymand, a UNESCO World Heritage village where families live in dwellings hand-cut into soft rock, roughly four hundred chambers, some of them occupied continuously for something close to three thousand years. It is a semi-nomadic community that still moves with its herds through the year and returns to the caves in winter, which is why the place has never become a museum. You stay the night in one of the dwellings. It is not a five-star room and it is not trying to be; sleeping inside a rock that people have slept in since the Iron Age is the point.

An early start west, and then the day the whole route has been building toward. Persepolis, begun by Darius in 518 BC and burned by Alexander in 330: the Gate of All Nations with its winged bulls, the Apadana staircase where delegations from twenty-three subject nations still climb the wall bearing tribute, each carved in its own dress. Naqsh-e Rostam four miles on, where four Achaemenid kings lie in cross-shaped tombs cut high into the cliff, Sasanian victory reliefs beneath them and the Kaaba of Zoroaster squared off in front. Then Pasargadae, Cyrus the Great's capital, and the plain stepped tomb that Alexander stopped to have restored. Into Shiraz for the night.

Shiraz proper, and the city relaxes you immediately: this is the soft, green, romantic end of Iran. The Zandiyeh complex covers Karim Khan's citadel with its conspicuously leaning corner tower, the Vakil Mosque, the Vakil bathhouse, and the Vakil Bazaar, where you can spend an hour among Persian carpets with no obligation whatsoever. Then Saadi's tomb, set over a spring-fed pool full of fish, and the Eram Garden, UNESCO-listed, cypress-lined, and the most beautiful of the Shiraz gardens in almost any season. Overnight Shiraz.

Timed, not scheduled. The Nasir al-Mulk opens early and for about an hour the low sun comes through its east-facing stained glass and turns the carpets into shifting colour, someone designed that room in the 1880s knowing exactly what the light would do. Then Qavam's orangery at Narenjestan, all mirrorwork and orange trees, and the shrine of Ali Ibn Hamzeh, whose mirrored interior is one of the great surprises of the city. You finish at the tomb of Hafez, which is not a monument so much as a garden where Iranians come at dusk to read his poems aloud to one another, and often to complete strangers. Farewell dinner in Shiraz.

A transfer to Shiraz International timed to your flight, with your guide alongside you to the terminal. If your departure is late enough there is room for one more garden or a last hour in the bazaar. As with the shorter route, we are glad to build extensions onto either end, Tabriz and the northwest, the cave village of Kandovan, or the Persian Gulf islands of Qeshm and Hormuz, which look like nowhere else in the country.