Yerevan sits at about a thousand metres on a dry plateau, far from any sea. That is the summary of its climate and it explains everything else: with no water around to buffer, the temperature soars in summer and collapses in winter, and rainfall is so scarce that it is not even the variable to watch.
01 A city of extremes
The raw numbers. In January the average high is 1.2 degrees and the low −8.1, and in cold-air episodes the thermometer can reach −20. In August the average high is 34.5, and some days touch 40. Between those extremes there are more than forty degrees of range on the same street and over the same stone.
02 It hardly rains here
The second figure to internalise is the dryness: 365 millimetres a year over 78 days. For comparison, that is half what falls on Rome and a quarter of Ljubljana's. July gets 15 millimetres and August 10. In high summer it simply does not rain.
That has one good consequence and one bad. The good: you do not need to hold back days in case of rain, and the dry air at a thousand metres gives a crisp light that flatters a city of pale stone. The bad: the sun gets no reprieve, and shade is scarce on the wide avenues of the 1924 plan.
August brings ten millimetres for the whole month. The variable here is not rain: it is shade.
03 The two short windows
The first is May: highs of 24.8 degrees, slopes covered in flower and a city already living outdoors without the heat bearing down. It rains on twelve days, but in afternoon showers, not grey stretches. It is the month when the surrounding country is green, which happens only a few weeks a year.
The second runs from mid-September to mid-October, and it is the one I would choose. September has highs of 29.6 degrees and only four rainy days; October drops to 21.6. It is harvest season in the countryside, the air is clean and the low light brings out the colour of the tuff better than at any other time of year.
04 If summer is what you get
July and August are not impossible, but they require reorganising the whole day. With average highs of 34 degrees and peaks of 40, the plan has to be an early start, indoors between one and five, and out again as the afternoon cools. It is exactly what the people who live here do.
There is also a real compensation the good windows do not offer: in summer the nights are long and mild, the city fills up from nine onwards and the terraces run late. If you accept inverting your schedule, summer gives a version of Yerevan that does not exist in October.
05 The verdict
Mid-September to mid-October, if you can choose. It is the only stretch where everything lines up: comfortable temperature, four rainy days a month, the year's most flattering light for a city of stone and the surrounding country at its best.
May is the alternative, and in one respect it wins: it is when the landscape is green and in flower, something that in this climate lasts a very short time. And a warning about winter: do not choose it assuming that cold at a thousand metres in dry air is like that of a coastal capital. It is not, and the city moves indoors.
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