In short
Baku sits on the Caspian, below sea level — the city lies about twenty-eight metres under the level of the oceans, which makes it the lowest capital in the world.
Icherisheher, the fortified inner city, is World Heritage listed: an inhabited quarter, with the Maiden Tower and the Palace of the Shirvanshahs. The Flame Towers, three flame-shaped towers, overlook the city from Martyrs' Lane. The Caspian boulevard runs along the sea for several kilometres.
Arriving and getting around
Heydar Aliyev airport is some twenty kilometres out, linked by express bus.
The metro is simple and very cheap; the BakiKart works on the metro and the buses. The centre is walked.
One serious entry warning: the Azerbaijani authorities refuse entry to people who have visited Nagorno-Karabakh without prior authorisation, and the ban is enforced. Check the conditions in force with the relevant Azerbaijani diplomatic mission before booking.
What it really costs
Baku is affordable by European standards, accommodation included, although the centre charges more.
The currency is the manat.
When to come
April–June and September–October. Summer is hot; winter is mild but extremely windy — Baku means roughly "city of winds", and the northerly khazri blows hard.
Nowruz, the spring equinox, is the great festival of the year.
What nobody tells you
The Heydar Aliyev Center, by Zaha Hadid, is one of the most photographed buildings in contemporary architecture: a continuous white surface with no apparent right angle. It houses exhibitions and can be visited.
Gobustan, an hour to the south, concentrates two unrelated and equally remarkable things: petroglyphs more than ten thousand years old, World Heritage listed, and a concentration of mud volcanoes among the highest on the planet — Azerbaijan has several hundred. They are cold cones emitting mud, with no relation to magmatic volcanism.
Yanar Dag, "the burning mountain", is a hillside where surfacing natural gas has burned continuously for centuries. It is that geological peculiarity that earned the country its nickname "land of fire" and fed the Zoroastrian cult, of which the Ateshgah temple keeps the trace.