It was the largest lake in the Middle East — a sheet of saltwater the size of a small country. Within a single lifetime it lost more than ninety percent of itself, and the brine that remains turns the colour of blood each summer. Urmia is the most beautiful disaster in Iran: a giant dying in the open, and, for now, refusing to finish.
"…behind the Chaechasta lake, the deep lake of salt waters…"
The Avesta, Gōsh Yasht 9 · trans. James Darmesteter, 1898 — Chichast was the ancient name of Lake Urmia
For most of recorded history this was simply the great lake of the northwest — the Avestan texts called it Chichast, the glittering one. At its height it covered between five and six thousand square kilometres, the largest lake in the Middle East and one of the largest saltwater lakes on Earth, dotted with more than a hundred islands and ringed by wetlands that drew flamingos by the tens of thousands. It was protected every way a place can be: national park, Ramsar site, UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
Then, across about thirty years, it began to disappear. In 1995 the lake held roughly 32 billion cubic metres of water. By the summer of 2025, officials measured its volume at around half a billion — and declared it, for a time, effectively dry: a surface shrunk to some 581 square kilometres of shallow brine over a vast white salt flat. More than ninety percent of its area, and over ninety-eight percent of its water, gone in a generation.
What remains is unstable. A wet winter and spring in 2026 raised the level by about a metre and brought a flush of red water back to parts of the basin — but it still sits more than three metres below the level the lake needs to survive, and officials call its condition fragile. Cutting the whole thing in two is the Shahid Kalantari Highway, a causeway driven across the lake's narrow waist, often blamed for strangling what circulation is left. Stand on it now and you look out, depending on the year and the month, at either a shallow red sea or a desert of salt with the rusting jetties of old tour boats stranded far from any water.
The blood-red is real, and it is not pollution. As the summer sun shrinks the lake and concentrates the salt, only a few organisms can survive the brine — and they are red. The micro-alga Dunaliella salina floods itself with carotenoid pigments, the same family that colours carrots, to shield against the glare; salt-loving archaea, the Halobacteria, add their own deep red. Where they bloom together the water turns rose, then tomato, then arterial.
There is a grim logic to it. The redder the lake, the saltier and shallower it has become — the colour deepens precisely as the lake weakens. What looks, in photographs, like a miracle of nature is closer to a fever chart. The most beautiful Urmia has ever been is the sickest it has ever been.
Why it happened is genuinely contested, and politically charged. The scientific consensus points to a compounding of causes — irrigated agriculture expanded far beyond what the watershed could sustain, dam-building on the rivers that fed the lake, and a long drought sharpened by climate change. Environmental activists allege mismanagement and worse; officials emphasise the drought. What is not in dispute is the arithmetic: a lake this large does not empty by accident in a single lifetime.
Long before the catastrophe, this lake carried a stack of names across three thousand years — and history has turned every one of them into an irony. The province's capital, and the lake named after it, take their name from the Assyrian Aramaic ur, "city," and mia, "water": Urmia, the City of Water. The oldest Persian name, Chichast, meant "the glittering one" — for the mineral light off its deep surface. Strabo and Pliny knew it as Lake Matianus; the Greeks called it Spauta; medieval Persians called it Kabuda, "the azure." A city of water, glittering and blue. Today the glitter is salt, and the blue is gone.
It was old enough, and sacred enough, to hold a place in the founding literature of Iran. In the Avesta — the Zoroastrian scripture — the hero-king Husravah, the Kay Khosrow of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, comes to this shore to take his revenge: to bind the Turanian villain Afrāsiāb and avenge the murder of his father Siyāvash, "behind the Chaechasta lake, the deep lake of salt waters." The same saga that runs through the Shahnameh places one of its turning points on this exact water.
Read the phrase again with what you now know. The Avesta called it deep. At its height the lake ran some sixteen metres to the bottom; today, where there is water at all, you can wade out for a kilometre and not pass your knees. The scripture's "deep lake of salt waters" has become a shin-deep film of brine over a salt plain. (Some scholars place the Avestan Chaēchasta instead at the sacred lake of nearby Takht-e Soleyman — either way, the deep-water memory belongs to this corner of Iran.)
The lake sat at the centre of a real ancient world, too, not only a literary one: it was the heartland of the Iron Age Mannaean kingdom, whose great burned citadel at Hasanlu still stands on its southern shore, and one tradition even names this region the birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster. For most of recorded Iranian history, in other words, Urmia was the deep, glittering, holy water of the northwest. It is going dry in a single human lifetime.
The whole living system rested on one creature: Artemia urmiana, a brine shrimp found almost nowhere else, which thrived in water far too salty for fish. The Artemia fed the birds — Lake Urmia was a major breeding ground and migratory stopover for greater flamingos, white pelicans and white-headed ducks, the flamingos taking their pink from the shrimp they ate. As salinity climbed past even the brine shrimp's limit, that base of the web began to fail, and with it the spectacle of the flocks.
The islands tell the same story from land. Kabudan and its neighbours were refuges for Armenian mouflon and Persian gazelle, safe because they were surrounded by water. As the lake withdrew, the water bridges that protected them turned into land bridges — opening the islands to predators and erasing the very thing that made them sanctuaries.
And then there is what the wind does with a dried lakebed. The exposed salt, laced with decades of agricultural residue, lifts into salt storms that settle on farmland and lungs across a region of some five million people. A vanished lake does not simply leave a hole; it spreads itself, grain by grain, over everyone who lives around it.
Untamed Iran rates each place on two axes — Adventure, the demands it makes on your body, and Legacy, the weight it carries. Urmia is no expedition; you can drive across it on a highway. Its power is almost entirely the other kind — a place that means something, and means it loudly.
You leave the car where the maps still say "lake" and start walking. The ground is white and cracked into plates that crunch and give underfoot, and the heat comes up off it in sheets. There is no shade and no sound — no lapping, no birds nearby, just your own footsteps and the ringing of a very large, very quiet place.
Then, far out, a line of colour. You keep walking and it resolves into water: shallow, still, warm as a bath, and red — not orange, not pink, red — lapping in slow thick fingers at a crust of salt. A jetty built for boats ends in mid-air above dry ground. On the far horizon, a thread of paler pink lifts and resettles, and you realise it is flamingos, standing in what is left.
You crouch and put a hand in. It comes out warm, and rimmed in white, and faintly stained.
A lake the size of a province lost more than ninety percent of itself in one lifetime, and turns the colour of blood each summer — a red that could be a last breath, or a first.
I had never given Urmia a cigarette of its own. It felt sadder than I could bear. So the one time I crossed its dry, salt shore, I did not smoke there — I wanted it to leave less of a mark on me, so that one day, perhaps, I could forget its grief.
But this year, after a glorious rainy season, the first in years, the water has risen so far that the lake is almost alive again.
When I read the news, I put my shoes on, walked down to the small artificial lake beside our house in Loughborough, lit the Urmia cigarette, and started planning this very article. I was so lost in it — in my own happiness and excitement — that the cigarette slipped out of my hand. I went to light another, then changed my mind. I picked the same one up, blew it clean, and went on smoking it with all the pleasure in the world.
The reddest season. Peak heat and evaporation concentrate the brine and the colour deepens to blood. Also the hottest, harshest time, and the season of salt storms — go early in the day.
The highest water, after winter inflow, and the best chance of flamingos and other waterbirds. Milder, and more likely to show you an actual lake rather than a salt flat.
Receding and quiet. Cooler light, fewer people, the colour fading. A bleak, contemplative time at the shore.
Cold, with ice possible at the margins. This is the inflow season that decides what the lake will be the following year — but a stark time to visit.
⚠ The single most important variable isn't the month — it's the year. Depending on rainfall and how much water is released to the lake, the same shore can be red brine or bone-dry salt. Check current conditions before you make the trip.
Planning detail — gear, logistics, and questions — folded away so you can open only what you need.
The lake lies between two major cities, so reaching a viewpoint is easy; reaching the water can be another matter as the shoreline retreats.
It depends on the year. In summer 2025 it was declared effectively dry — about 581 km² of shallow brine, down from a former 5,000+. After the wet winter and spring of 2026 the level rose roughly a metre and red water returned in places, but it remains fragile and below the ecological level. You may find red water, or salt to the horizon.
As heat concentrates the salt, red organisms bloom — the alga Dunaliella salina (carotenoid pigments) and red Halobacteria. The deeper the colour, the saltier and shallower the lake; the red is a symptom, strongest in mid-to-late summer.
A compounding of causes: irrigated farming expanded beyond the watershed's capacity, many dams on feeder rivers, prolonged drought and climate change, with the causeway worsening circulation. The issue is politically charged; causes are debated, the arithmetic of loss is not.
When there's water, the brine is dense enough to float in, like the Dead Sea, and the mud is used for skin treatments. But the bed is treacherous and the lake unreliable — go carefully, never drive on the crust, and respect it as a national park.
Between Urmia (west) and Tabriz (east), both with airports. The Shahid Kalantari causeway crosses the lake and gives the easiest view; reaching the water itself may mean a walk over salt.
Possibly, but not easily. The lake has rebounded before — wet years in 2019 and 2026 brought water back — so it is not biologically dead. But survival depends less on rain than on cutting the water drawn off upstream for farming: the restoration programme's own target levels have repeatedly been missed. Most scientists say the lake can be stabilised, though probably never returned to its 1990s size.
Urmia anchors the highlands of Iranian Azerbaijan, and its neighbours deepen it. On the lake's southern shore stands Hasanlu, an Iron Age citadel that died violently in a single night three thousand years ago — two ruins of different scales now sharing one basin. Southeast lies Takht-e Soleyman, the Sasanian fire sanctuary built around its own small, miraculous lake — water revered where Urmia's is mourned. Near Tabriz, the rock-cut village of Kandovan is the human face of these mountains. And Urmia is not alone in what it does: far to the south, near Shiraz, Maharlu turns the same impossible red, while on the Caspian shore the wetland of Miankaleh still holds the flamingos in their thousands — a living picture of everything Urmia is trying not to lose.
Lake Urmia's numbers change by the season and the year, so this article leans on recent official statements and satellite records, and tries to separate what is established from what is contested.
Facts last reviewed June 2026. Established: Urmia was the largest lake in the Middle East (5,000–6,000 km²); it has lost >90% of area and >98% of volume since the mid-1990s; it turns red from Dunaliella salina and Halobacteria as salinity rises; it is a national park, Ramsar site and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve; salt storms and island land-bridges are documented harms. Fast-changing / contested: the water level and area swing dramatically year to year (near-dry in 2025, partly revived in 2026) — confirm current conditions before travelling; and the balance of human vs natural causes is genuinely debated and politically charged. The ancient names (Chichast “glittering,” Aramaic Urmia “city of water,” classical Matianus) are well attested; the Avesta’s Chaechasta is traditionally identified with Lake Urmia, though some scholars place it at nearby Takht-e Soleyman, and Zoroaster’s birth here is tradition, not established fact. Exact depth and salinity figures vary by source and date.