High in the Zagros north of Shiraz, a cliff opens into a seventy-metre wall of falling water — one of the largest waterfalls in Iran, loud enough to hear before you see it. Then the strangeness lands: nothing feeds it from above. No river runs over the top, no stream gathers at the lip. The water comes straight out of the rock, from hundreds of separate springs along the face of the limestone, braiding down like a row of pale snakes. This is Margoon, and it breaks the rule every waterfall is supposed to keep. It is not where a river ends. It is where one begins.
“A spring comes forth from the stone, and rain from the cloud.”
Margoon (آبشار مارگون) falls in the western valleys of Sepidan County — the old Ardakan — high in the Zagros of Fars province, near the border with Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad. From a distance it reads as an ordinary great waterfall: a seventy-metre curtain, roughly a hundred metres wide, white against grey rock. Walk up from the car park, look properly, and the anomaly arrives. There is nothing above it. No river crosses the plateau to the cliff; no channel funnels to the edge. The water is emerging from the cliff itself — from hundreds of separate springs strung along the face of the limestone, each a small mouth in the stone, together a curtain wide enough to fill the valley with sound.
This is what geologists call a resurgence, or spring, waterfall, and Margoon is among the largest and most famous of its kind in Iran. Most waterfalls are a biography's last chapter — a river that has run for miles finally meeting a cliff. Margoon is the first chapter. The water gathered at its foot has no upstream; it becomes the Margoon River right there, at the base of the fall, and runs off toward Sepidan watering orchards as it goes. You are not watching a river fall. You are watching one born.
The name records exactly what the eye sees. Mar is the Persian for snake; mar-gun means snake-like. There is no single sheet of water here — there are dozens of threads, each leaving the rock at a slightly different point, twisting and braiding and parting on the way down like a row of long pale snakes hung on the cliff. And the water is startlingly cold: fed by the snows of the high Zagros filtered through the mountain, it stays below about 10°C even in high summer, so that the whole gorge breathes cool air while the plains beyond bake.
It sits high — about 2,200 metres above the sea — in a steep dead-end valley clothed, unusually for this latitude, in oak forest, orchards and wild green. In winter the springs half-freeze into hanging columns of ice; in spring the snowmelt drives them to their fullest roar. The falls are listed on Iran's National Natural Heritage register, and the surrounding forest was declared the Margoon Protected Area in 1999.
Coordinates are approximate. The falls sit in a steep dead-end valley near Margoon village, Sepidan; reached from Shiraz via Sepidan (~130–160 km) or from Yasuj to the north (~65 km, signed off the Yasuj–Eqlid road). The road runs to within ~800 m; the rest is a paved footpath.
The trick has a name — karst — and once you know it, Margoon stops being magic and becomes something better: legible. Four steps take snow on a summit and turn it into a curtain bursting from a cliff.
Rain and snow fall on the high Zagros above the cliff. On this limestone country almost none of it runs off in streams — it disappears into the rock, down cracks and sinkholes, vanishing from the surface entirely.
Limestone is soluble. Over ages the water widens the cracks into a hidden network of conduits and passages inside the mountain — an underground plumbing system that carries the water sideways and down, unseen.
Where the saturated rock is cut by the cliff face, the water has nowhere to go but out. It emerges all along one line — a resurgence — appearing as hundreds of springs at every point where a conduit meets the open air.
Each spring becomes a thread; the threads together become the fall. That is why Margoon is a braided curtain, not a single sheet — and why it is cold, constant, and fed by a mountain instead of a river.
This is the same limestone machinery that, elsewhere in Iran, hollows out the show-caves of Ali Sadr and carves the gorge of Raghez. At Margoon it does something rarer: instead of hiding the water underground, it hands the whole hidden river back to daylight, all at once, down the face of a cliff.
Margoon is not only strange; it is generous. The constant cold water has grown a valley that has no business being this lush in southern Iran: oak woodland on the slopes, apple and hawthorn and barberry in the clearings, and a permanent green corridor following the new-born river down toward Sepidan. The high air — thin, clean, and cool even at the height of a Fars summer — makes the place a refuge, and not only for people: the protected forest still shelters brown bears, wild goats, wolves and foxes on its higher slopes. The roar of the springs fills it wall to wall. In the cold months the same water turns to hanging columns of ice down the cliff, and the valley trades its green for a chandelier.
It is Lur and Qashqai country. The villages of the Margoon district — Kamehr and its neighbours, orchard-rich and stone-built — belong to communities who have summered these highlands for generations, and whose dress, dialect and hospitality are part of the valley's texture. Above them rise the serious mountains: Mount Ranj, over 3,600 m, a magnet for climbers, and the ski runs of Sepidan (Pooladkaf) on the winter snows that will, months later, come pouring out of Margoon's cliff. The whole system is one loop of water — snow to spring to river to orchard — and the waterfall is the moment you can see it turn.
Margoon is a rare thing in this collection: a wonder that is genuinely beautiful and genuinely strange, with a real walk to earn it. Its Adventure score comes from altitude, cold, wet rock and a mountain road; its Legacy from a geological singularity — a great waterfall with no river — set in a green Zagros valley that photographs like a dream.
You hear it first. Long before the path turns and the cliff comes into view, the valley is already full of a sound like sustained applause, and the air has gone cold and wet against your face. Then you round the rock and there it is: a grey wall a hundred metres across, and pouring off it a curtain of white — not one fall but dozens, threads of water hung side by side, twisting as they drop, exactly the row of pale snakes the name promised.
You climb the last steps to the base, and the cold hits like an open freezer — the water is under ten degrees, straight from inside a mountain, and the spray it throws chills the whole amphitheatre of rock. You look up to find the source, the way you would at any waterfall, expecting a river-lip against the sky. There is none. The top of the cliff is just… cliff, dry stone and oak against blue — and the water is coming out of the rock below it, from a hundred hidden mouths, as if the mountain itself were weeping.
And that is the thought that stays. Every other waterfall you have stood under was an ending — the last thing a river does before the bottom. This one is a beginning. The water at your feet has never been a river before; it fell as snow on a summit, vanished into the stone, travelled the dark for who knows how long, and is arriving — right now, in front of you — in daylight for the very first time. You are not at the mouth of a river. You are at its birth.
A seventy-metre curtain bursting straight from a Zagros cliff, from hundreds of springs and no river at all — not where a river ends, but the rare place where one is born.
May and June are Margoon at full power — high-Zagros snowmelt driving the springs to maximum, the valley deep green, the air mild. The falls are loudest and widest, and the whole gorge is at its most alive.
July and August draw the crowds: the highland stays cool while Fars bakes, and the sub-10°C water is a magnet. Come on a weekday and early — the narrow dead-end road jams badly on summer weekends.
September and October bring settled weather, turning orchards, and far fewer people. The flow is lower than spring but the light and the calm are the reward.
December to February the springs half-freeze into hanging columns of ice — spectacular, but the mountain roads snow up and can close entirely. Only with winter driving sense and a check on conditions first.
The wonder is a cold curtain of water with no river above it. Reaching it is a mountain drive and a short paved climb; doing it safely means respecting wet rock, altitude and a crowded dead-end road. The details are below.
Margoon is one of the more accessible great waterfalls in the collection — paved almost to its foot — but it sits at the end of a mountain road that rewards an early start.
Margoon is in the high Zagros of Sepidan County (formerly Ardakan), Fars Province, near the Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad border. From Shiraz it is about 130–160 km north-west via Sepidan; from Yasuj to the north, about 65 km, signed at around km 29 of the Yasuj–Eqlid road. The road is paved to within roughly 800 m of the falls, then a short paved footpath with steps leads in. Sepidan or Shiraz makes the base.
Yes, and that is the point. Most waterfalls are a river meeting a cliff. Margoon has no river above it at all: the water emerges directly from hundreds of springs along the face of a limestone cliff, roughly 70 m high and 100 m wide, and braids down in separate threads. It is therefore the source of a river rather than a drop in one — the Margoon River begins at its foot. This makes it one of Iran's largest and most distinctive spring, or resurgence, waterfalls.
From inside the mountain. Snow and rain falling on the high Zagros sink into the limestone, travel underground through cracks and dissolved conduits (karst), and reappear where the water table meets the cliff face — a resurgence. The many springs across the rock are the underground water finding daylight all along one line, which is why the fall is a wide curtain of separate streams rather than a single sheet. The water stays cold, below about 10°C even in summer.
From the Persian mar, meaning snake: mar-gun means snake-like. The dozens of separate streams hanging and twisting down the cliff face look like a row of long pale snakes, and the name records exactly what the eye sees — many braided threads of water rather than one broad fall.
Late spring — May and June — is the peak, when high-Zagros snowmelt drives the springs to full volume, the valley is green and the weather mild. Summer is popular and pleasant, cool by the cold water, though weekends bring crowds and traffic on the narrow dead-end road. Autumn is quiet and lovely; winter is spectacular but harsh, with ice columns on the cliff and roads that snow can close entirely.
No. Vehicles reach to within about 800 metres of the falls, and the final approach is a paved path with concrete steps — easy for most visitors, though the altitude (~2,200 m) and steps ask for a steady pace. Wear grippy shoes: the stone near the falls is permanently wet and slick with spray, and the rocks are genuinely slippery.
The Sepidan (Pooladkaf) ski resort and Mount Ranj (over 3,600 m) rise nearby, the cool orchards of Kamehr village are minutes away, and the Sheshpir spring is a short trip. Shiraz — with Persepolis, Pasargadae and Naqsh-e Rostam beyond it — is the great cultural base to the south, making Margoon the wild green counterpoint to a classic Fars itinerary.
Margoon is the wild, cold, green Fars that the great stone monuments never show. Base in Shiraz and the province opens both ways at once: south into the deep history of Persepolis, the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae and the royal cliff of Naqsh-e Rostam; and north-west into these high Zagros valleys of oak forest, snowmelt and spring water. For the water thread itself, the collection runs on: the stepped travertine pools of Badab-e Surt, the emerald canyon of Raghez, and the glacial Gahar Lake higher in the same mountain chain — each a different way the Zagros keeps its water.
The ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid kings, an hour or two south — the stone heart of Fars to Margoon's wild water. The classic pairing of a Shiraz-based trip. Read the article →
Fars's emerald slot canyon of pools and cascades, elsewhere in the province — the same karst water, kept underground in a gorge instead of thrown off a cliff. Read the article →
A glacial lake high in the Zagros of neighbouring Lorestan — the mountains' still water to Margoon's falling water, and a serious trek to reach. Read the article →
The 3,600 m peak above the valley and the Sepidan (Pooladkaf) ski runs — the winter snows that months later come pouring, cold, out of Margoon's cliff.
Give Fars a week and let Margoon be its exhale: the monuments and gardens of the south for the mind, then the drive up into the oak forests for the lungs. Stand at the base in late spring with the cold spray on your face and the valley roaring, look up at the dry clifftop with no river on it, and watch the mountain hand its hidden water back to the light. It is the one waterfall you will leave thinking not about an ending, but a beginning.
Untamed Iran prefers official and first-hand sources, and separates what is established from what is repeated. Margoon is heavily covered by Iranian travel media, which is enthusiastic and sometimes loose with superlatives; this page keeps to the figures that recur across independent sources and flags the claims that do not. The following are the sources this page draws on:
Facts last reviewed July 2026. Established: the defining feature — no river above the falls, water emerging from many springs across a limestone cliff, forming the Margoon River at its foot; the location in Sepidan County, Fars, near the Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad border; the ~2,200 m elevation and sub-10°C water; the paved approach to ~800 m; the Margoon Protected Area, declared 1999. Widely cited, here rounded: a height of ~70 m and width of ~100 m recur across sources, though higher figures (up to ~120 m) and a range of distances (Shiraz ~128–160 km, Yasuj ~65 km) also circulate — the common values are used here. Treated with caution: the popular claim that Margoon is “the tallest” or “widest spring waterfall in the world” is an unverifiable superlative repeated by travel media and is not asserted; likewise “several thousand springs” is a common flourish, so this page says hundreds. The waterfall is on the National Natural Heritage register; a specific listing year is left unstated here because Iran's natural-heritage register only began operating in 2008 (1387, Mount Damavand first), which rules out the “1371/1992” date some travel sources repeat. Approximate: coordinates and the map marker.