The mountains are a lush green. They sit in stark contrast to the desert high plains around Tehran. While the Alborz Mountains surrounding the capital are dramatic, with spiky rocks and snow-covered peaks, the hills of Gilan are soft and rolling, covered in trees and fields, speckled with the occasional farmhouse.
Just a three-hour drive from the capital, it’s where Tehranians spend their weekends, filling their cars with petrol that costs barely ten cents a litre (at least before the war), and their thermoses with boiling black tea, flavoured with cardamom, saffron, and perhaps a little too much sugar.
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