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Discover Armenia

Armenia is a landlocked country of the South Caucasus, bordered by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey, and mountainous almost throughout: volcanic uplands, deep river gorges and the Ararat plain, with Mount Ararat rising across the Turkish border. Christianity became the state religion in the early fourth century, and the monasteries built since — several UNESCO-listed — are the country's defining architecture.

Yerevan sits on the Ararat plain, replanned in the 1920s on a radial-circular plan of wide avenues around a central square, and built largely from pink tuff. Gyumri, on the Shirak plateau, keeps a nineteenth-century core of black and red volcanic tuff. Dilijan is a forested spa town in the Aghstev valley, Vagharshapat is the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and Lake Sevan lies high in the mountains with beaches along its shore.

Top places in Armenia

• Yerevan — The capital on the Ararat plain: Republic Square, the Cascade stairway and the Matenadaran repository of medieval Armenian manuscripts.
• Lake Sevan — One of the world's largest high-altitude freshwater lakes, ringed by mountains, with the Sevanavank monastery on a peninsula at its northwest end.
• Vagharshapat (Echmiadzin) — Seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church: its cathedral and churches are UNESCO-listed alongside the ruined seventh-century cathedral of Zvartnots.
• Geghard & Garni — A UNESCO-listed monastery with churches cut into the rock of the upper Azat valley, near the colonnaded Garni temple standing above a gorge of basalt columns.
• Dilijan — A spa town in the wooded Aghstev valley inside Dilijan National Park, with the monasteries of Haghartsin and Goshavank nearby.
• Gyumri — Armenia's second-largest city, on the Shirak plateau in the northwest, where the Kumayri district preserves nineteenth-century streets of black and red tuff.