Band-e Amir National Park

Band-e Amir National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Band-e Amir is a chain of six deep blue lakes held behind natural dams of pale rock in a desert canyon of the Hindu Kush, in the central highlands of Afghanistan, at an altitude of about 2,900 metres, and it is by general agreement the most beautiful natural landscape in the country. It must be said at the outset that nearly every foreign government has for years advised its citizens against all travel to Afghanistan, that consular help there is unavailable to most, and that since August 2023 the Taliban authorities have forbidden women to visit the park; what follows describes the place, not a recommendation to go. The lakes lie about seventy-five kilometres, an hour and a half to two hours by a road that is now largely paved, west of the town of Bamiyan, in the valley once watched over by the colossal Buddhas, which has a small airport with occasional flights from Kabul and is otherwise six hours or more from the capital by road.

The few foreign visitors who come do so with a specialised agency, a vehicle and a local guide, generally as a day trip from Bamiyan or with a night in one of the very simple guesthouses near the lakes. The road descends into the canyon at Band-e Haibat, the most accessible of the lakes, where there are a car park, a line of stalls and kebab shops, the shrine, and a fleet of pedal boats in the shape of swans, which Afghan families hire to paddle on the water. Paths lead along the top of the great dam and round the shore, a walk along the cliff edge gives the finest views, and with a vehicle and half a day one can visit the other lakes, Zulfiqar, the largest, upstream, and Panir and Pudina below. The park charges a small entrance fee.

Visiting Band-e Amir National Park: what you will see

Band-e Amir was declared the first national park of Afghanistan in April 2009, covering about 590 square kilometres, after decades in which a declaration first planned in 1973 had been prevented by coups, invasion and civil war, and it has been on the country's tentative list for World Heritage since 2004. The six lakes, strung along eleven kilometres of the valley, are Gholaman, the lake of the slaves, Qambar, the lake of the caliph Ali's groom, Haibat, the lake of awe, Panir, the cheese lake, Pudina, the wild mint lake, and Zulfiqar, the lake of Ali's sword. They are of a kind that exists in very few places in the world, the lakes of Plitvice in Croatia being the best-known parallel. The springs that feed them rise through faults in the limestone and are heavily charged with dissolved calcium carbonate; where the water is slowed and aerated, and where mosses and algae take up carbon dioxide from it, the mineral is deposited as travertine, which over thousands of years has built, across the bed of the valley, a series of curving walls, the largest some ten metres high and hundreds long, over whose lips the water spills in a fringe of small cascades from one lake to the next. The water, filtered and mineral-laden, is of an almost unnatural clarity and colour, from turquoise at the edges to a deep lapis blue where it is deepest, Haibat being said to reach a hundred and fifty metres, and the contrast with the bare pink and ochre cliffs of the canyon, under a sky of high-altitude blue, is what every visitor remembers.

Local belief has another explanation. The people of the region are Hazaras, Shia Muslims, and in their tradition the dams were raised in a single day by Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, in the course of freeing a slave and subduing a tyrant king and a dragon, whose petrified body is shown in a valley near Bamiyan: he threw down a mountainside to make the first, hewed the second with his sword, his groom built the third, the slaves the fourth, and so on, and the name of the whole means the dam of the commander. The small shrine beside Band-e Haibat marks a place where he is said to have stood, and pilgrims come to bathe in the icy water, which is credited with curing the sick and the infertile, the women formerly entering from a curtained enclosure. The surrounding mountains are high, cold steppe, grazed in summer by flocks, with ibex and urial on the crags, wolves, foxes, and, among the birds, the Afghan snowfinch, the only bird confined to Afghanistan. In 2013 the park appointed four women as rangers, the first in the country. The poverty of the dozen villages inside the park, which depend on farming, grazing and cutting shrubs for fuel, all of which damage it, is the central problem of its management, and in the years before 2021 the lakes drew well over a hundred thousand Afghan visitors a year.

Band-e Amir National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The season is short. The road from Bamiyan is generally open from about May to October, and the best months are June to September, when the days are warm, 20 to 25 degrees, the nights cold and the sky almost always clear; Fridays and the Afghan holidays bring the crowds of picnickers. In spring the snow melts late and the track may be muddy, and from November to April the highlands are under deep snow, temperatures fall to minus twenty and below, the lakes freeze, and the park is cut off for long periods.

The altitude is felt by those arriving from the lowlands, and the sun is fierce. There are no medical facilities. Landmines and unexploded munitions remain a hazard off the used paths in many parts of the region. Dress and behaviour must conform to local rules. The remains of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroyed in March 2001, the cave monasteries and the ruined citadels of Shahr-e Gholghola and Shahr-e Zohak are in and near Bamiyan.