01 Three hundred and fifty out of seven hundred
The figure is what makes this worth a trip. Around seven hundred mud volcanoes are known across the whole planet. Of those, some three hundred and fifty are in this country, that is, roughly half. And the greatest concentration is in the eastern strip, beside the Caspian and a short distance from the capital.
It is worth understanding why they cluster here, because that is the interesting part. A mud volcano forms where pressurised gas is trapped in deep sedimentary layers: the gas pushes upwards, drags water and clay with it, and all of it surfaces. In other words, the same geological structure that filled this peninsula's underground with hydrocarbons is what manufactures the mud cones.
02 What exactly comes out
It is worth adjusting your expectations before going, because the word volcano promises something else. There is no lava here, no heat, no column of smoke. There are cones between half a metre and several metres high, with a crater at the top full of grey mud bubbling slowly. The mud comes out cold: you can put your hand in it.
And that, which sounds like a disappointment, is exactly what makes it memorable. You are standing in front of a landscape that behaves like a domestic-scale model of a volcano, with metre-long mud flows, plate-sized craters and eruptions that sound like a saucepan. You can walk around it, crouch and look closely, which no real volcano allows.
The same geological structure that filled the underground with oil is what manufactures the mud cones.
03 Ten kilometres away, six thousand carvings
And here is why this excursion repays the transfer. In the same area, a short distance from the mud cones, lies the Gobustan rock art cultural landscape, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2007 for its collection of more than six thousand carvings ranging from the tenth millennium BC to the Middle Ages.
The site is walked on boardwalks among fallen rock blocks that form shelters and passages. The carvings are not individually signposted and you have to look for them: shallow incised lines that appear and disappear depending on how the light falls. In midday sun they are hard to see; first thing or last thing, they jump out.
04 How to see it
The order that works is to do both in the same day and in this sequence: the rock art first, early, with the low light that makes the carvings legible; then the mud volcanoes, which look the same at any hour. There are only a few kilometres between them.
Two practical warnings. The last stretch to the cones is unpaved track and is usually done in an all-terrain vehicle hired on the spot; an ordinary car does not always make it. And the mud genuinely stains: it is very fine grey clay that grips shoes and clothing, so do not go in anything you care about.
And one thought for the drive back. This excursion and the city tell the same story from two sides. In Baku, the gas and oil underground appear transformed into restored walls, mansions and glass towers. Here, an hour away, the same underground expresses itself with no intermediary: pushing cold mud to the surface, as it has been doing since long before anyone drilled anything.
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