In a dry fold of the Kerman mountains, a village did not build its houses — it dug them, by hand, straight into the rock. Some four hundred dwellings and two and a half thousand rooms were hollowed out of the hillside over uncounted generations, and people are living in them still. Not a ruin, not a museum: a home that is part of the mountain, and has been for the better part of three thousand years.
"They say the Lion and the Lizard keep / The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep."
Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát (tr. FitzGerald) · on the palaces that did not last
Drive northeast from Shahr-e Babak into the bare hills of western Kerman and you will nearly miss it: a brown slope, a scatter of dark openings, smoke rising from the rock. This is Meymand (میمند), and what looks at first like caves in a hillside is a village — one of the oldest still-living villages in Iran, and one made in a way almost no other place was. Its homes were not raised on the ground. They were cut into it: dug by hand, room by room, deep into the soft volcanic rock.
The people here, the story goes, carved their houses straight into the soft rock they call kamar, room by patient room. Some four hundred of these cut homes (kiche) honeycomb the hillside, each with up to seven rooms, stacked four and five storeys into the slope, threaded by passages and alleys cut from the same rock. In all, around 2,500 hand-dug rooms. No mortar, no walls raised, no roof set on top — every space here is the shape of the stone that someone, once, carried out by hand.
That is the thing to hold onto at Meymand: this is architecture by subtraction. And because rock holds its temperature, the homes stay cool through the desert summer and warm through the hard winter — which is part of why, for some two to three thousand years, people have never stopped living in them. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Cultural Landscape of Maymand, inscribed in 2015 — and, importantly, still somebody's home.
Building adds; Meymand takes away. A home here begins as a hole and grows inward, and the method has barely changed in millennia.
The hillside is soft volcanic stone — firm enough to hold a ceiling, soft enough to cut. The whole village is one workable seam.
First a kiche, an alley dug into the slope, deep enough to reach solid rock with privacy and shelter behind it.
Off the passage, rooms are carved out by hand — living spaces, stables, stores — each with a hearth, stacked storeys deep.
Generations widened and deepened what they inherited. The house you stand in is the work of many hands across centuries.
Inside, the effect is its own reward: thick rock walls that never raised dust into wind, a hearth blackening a ceiling that has been blackened for a very long time, and a stillness and even temperature that no built house of mud or brick can match. The home does not sit on the landscape. It is the landscape, with the people moved inside.
For all that the cut houses feel permanent, the people of Meymand have never simply stayed put. They are semi-nomadic agro-pastoralists, and traditionally they move with the seasons between three settlements, spending roughly a third of the year in each. In the cold months they live in the rock village itself, warm in the carved homes. In spring they move out to lower plains to graze their animals and gather wild almonds. In the warm months they go up to gardens to the north, to wild pistachio, walnut, grape and pear. The carved village is the winter heart of a life that breathes outward and back each year — a rhythm written into the same landscape as the homes.
Because Meymand is remote, and because the rock outlasts everything, the place has held on to more than its architecture. The villagers' dialect still carries words from Pahlavi and Sasanian Persian — language from before the Arab conquest, preserved by isolation. The carved dwellings are thought to have begun as religious spaces in the pre-Islamic world, perhaps tied to the worship of light and the sun, before they slowly became homes; later, mosques and a Hosseinieh were cut into the same rock, one faith layered over another in the same stone. And in the hills around — at the Eshkaft grotto and elsewhere — are engravings and pictographs said to be far older still, traces of people in this landscape long before the village itself was dug.
Everything built on the surface of the earth is, from the first day, beginning to fall. Gravity pulls at the wall, water works into the foundation, wind and frost prise at every joint; and time, patient above all, takes it back in the end. The oldest ordinary houses anywhere that still stand without rebuilding are only a few hundred years old — sooner or later the foundation settles, the wall cracks, the roof comes down. Nature always wins. To build against it is only to choose how long you lose by.
Meymand did not build against it. Raising walls on open ground would have been the easier path — it always is — but the easy path is the one nature fights. So the people here took the harder one. The rock had already made caves and proved they could last; they would work the way the rock worked, and carve homes the shape of a life into the living stone, by hand, across a hundred generations. Hollowing a mountain is far more labour than stacking a wall. But it is labour spent with the grain of the world instead of against it — and the world does not leave that unpaid. After two thousand years and more, there is no settled foundation here, no wall pulled loose, no fallen roof, because nothing was ever set against the rock for the rock to push back out. What is built against nature falls. What is built with it stays.
There are older troglodyte landscapes, and more famous ones. The carved valleys of Cappadocia in Turkey are larger and draw far bigger crowds; cave villages dot the Mediterranean from Spain's Costa Almeria to Jordan. But walk through almost any of them and you are walking through a museum: the dwellings emptied generations ago, the people long since rehoused, the rooms now gift shops and boutique hotels. UNESCO itself, in weighing Meymand, set it beside Cappadocia — and the line that matters is the simplest one. In Cappadocia, the troglodytes are gone. In Meymand, a grandmother still lights a fire in the room her family carved.
The same rock holds the village's whole religious memory, layer over layer. One cave unit, now a small museum, is marked as an Atash-Kadeh, a Zoroastrian fire temple; by local tradition the very first inhabitants were sun-worshippers, drawn to a faith of light before the fire-altars came, and later still a mosque and a Hosseinieh were cut into the same hill. Four faiths, if you count them, all hollowed out of one seam of stone. In 2005, before the World Heritage listing, UNESCO and Greece gave Meymand the Melina Mercouri Prize for keeping all of it alive.
It is worth saying plainly, because the village asks it of you: Meymand is a home, not an exhibit, and a fragile one. Fewer than three dozen people, most of them elderly, now keep the winter fires lit; the young have largely gone to the towns. Visit as a guest — buy the tea and the bread and the woven felt, sleep a night in a carved room if you can, and tread as you would in anyone's house. The surest way to keep a living village from becoming another empty Cappadocia is to let the living still make a living here.
Untamed Iran rates each place on two axes — Adventure, the demands it makes on your body, and Legacy, the weight it carries. Meymand asks almost nothing of your legs; what it carries is depth — one of the oldest living homes on Earth, dug by hand into the mountain.
You stoop through a low doorway out of the bright dry glare, and the temperature drops and the light goes soft, and you are standing inside the rock. The walls curve close, dimpled all over with the marks of the tool that cut them. The ceiling above the hearth is black — not painted black, but smoked black, by fires lit in this exact spot for longer than you can really hold in your head.
Run a hand along the wall and you are touching the actual labour of it: every hollow here was carried out of the hill by someone's arms, one stone at a time, and the room you are in was made not in a season but across lifetimes, each generation deepening what the last had begun. There is no foundation, no frame, nothing added. The house is simply the mountain, with a family-shaped space taken out of it.
Then someone's grandmother offers you tea by the same hearth, and it lands: this is not a ruin you are visiting. It is the oldest kind of home there is, and it is still warm.
Homes dug by hand into the mountain, room by room, over a hundred generations — hollows in the rock that have stayed warm with smoke and life for three thousand years. Empty is the one thing they have never been.
Every ancient site I have visited — in Iran and in dozens of other countries — has been full of signs: Do not touch. Do not come too close. No camera flash.
In Meymand, however, the story was different. Nothing was placed behind glass. There were no protective railings. The site was so powerful, so enduring, that it did not seem to need protection. I could easily touch it.
And something mattered to me far more than being able to touch it.
I could smoke my cigarette inside the monument.
I smoked my Meymand cigarette inside one of the houses — several times. After dinner, before sleeping, after waking up, after breakfast.
I had rented one of them.
The finest window. Mild days, the dry hills briefly touched with green, comfortable walking among the dwellings and easy travel on the mountain roads.
The other prime time — warm days cooling to crisp nights, clear light on the rock, and a calmer, quieter village. Excellent for photography.
Cold and sometimes snowy at altitude, but this is when the village is most alive: the semi-nomadic families return to the warm caves. Atmospheric, if you're prepared for the chill.
Hot and dry outside — though the carved interiors stay remarkably cool. Manageable if you visit in the morning and evening and rest through the midday heat.
⛏ Whatever the month, the rock keeps an even temperature inside — cool in the desert summer, sheltered in the mountain winter. The same property that made the village liveable for three thousand years still works on the day you visit.
Easy to walk, a long way to reach — and someone's home. Detail folded away below; open only what you need.
Meymand is deep in western Kerman, reached from Shahr-e Babak; an overnight in the caves is the way to do it justice.
A living troglodyte village in Kerman whose ~400 dwellings and ~2,500 rooms were dug by hand into soft rock over generations. Continuously inhabited for two to three thousand years; a UNESCO World Heritage Site (2015).
Kandovan's cone homes are natural rock formations people moved into, a few centuries old. Meymand's homes were dug out by hand, and the village is thousands of years old — architecture by subtraction.
Yes — a small, ageing community of semi-nomadic herders, though most rooms now stand empty. It's a real home, so visit with a guest's courtesy.
The carved village: two to three thousand years. Rock art and artefacts in the wider area are older (said to be up to ~10,000 years); the popular "12,000-year-old village" figure refers to early human presence in the landscape, not the carved homes.
~35 km northeast of Shahr-e Babak in western Kerman. By car or tour from Shahr-e Babak, Kerman or Yazd; the last stretch is mountain road.
By local tradition, yes — the earliest inhabitants are said to have worshipped the sun and light, and one cave unit, now a small museum, is identified as a Zoroastrian Atash-Kadeh (fire temple). Later a mosque and a Hosseinieh were carved into the same rock. None of this is firmly dated, but the layering of faiths in one hillside is real and visible.
Meymand makes most sense beside its opposite and its kin. In the northwest, Kandovan is the other great rock village — but where Meymand was dug by hand, Kandovan's cone homes were shaped by nature and simply moved into: the same instinct to live in stone, arrived at from opposite directions. The seasonal movement of Meymand's people belongs to the wider world of Iranian transhumance — the same yearly migration that brings the Bakhtiari and their black tents up to the ice cave of Chma. And for living culture that has held its own against time, the terraced, stair-stepped villages of Hawraman in the Zagros are Meymand's truest cousins. Closer to home, the same Kerman desert holds another work of earth raised by hand — the great mud citadel of Arg-e Bam, rebuilt brick by brick after the 2003 earthquake — before the land turns to pure spectacle in the wind-sculpted kaluts of Shahdad.
This article relies on the heritage record and reporting from the village, and is careful to keep the age of the carved village distinct from the much older traces in the surrounding landscape.
Facts last reviewed June 2026. Established: Meymand is a living hand-carved troglodyte village near Shahr-e Babak, Kerman, UNESCO-listed in 2015, with roughly 400 dwelling units and ~2,500 rooms cut into soft rock and continuous inhabitation generally given as 2,000–3,000 years. Approximate / often inflated: figures of "10,000" and "12,000 years" refer to early human presence and rock art in the wider landscape, not the age of the carved village, and exact room and dwelling counts vary between sources. It received the UNESCO–Greece Melina Mercouri Prize in 2005 and was inscribed as a World Heritage cultural landscape in 2015. The dwelling units are the kicheh; kamar is the soft volcanic rock they are cut into. Conditions, access and which homes are occupied change with the season — and this is an inhabited place, so check and ask locally.