Beyond the pink glass and the shrine queues, Shiraz keeps its culture in Qajar courtyard houses, UNESCO garden pavilions and bazaar workshops where khatam marquetry is still cut by hand. Three days of mirror halls, museums and Fars music.
A UNESCO-listed Persian garden laid out by Qashqai tribal chiefs, its three-storey Qajar pavilion faced in painted tilework showing Nasser al-Din Shah and Shahnameh scenes. Cypress avenues and a long reflecting pool; open 08:00–19:00.
A Safavid-founded garden rebuilt in 1863 for the Qavam family, its Qajar mansion sitting above Iran's second-largest arms collection — Achaemenid bronzes through Qajar rifles — displayed beneath painted stucco ceilings and mirrored halls.
The Qavam family's 1880s reception garden: a mirrored entrance hall, ceiling panels painted with European-style florals and cherubs, and a portico of spiralled columns above a courtyard of sour-orange trees and narrow water channels.
A 1930s Pahlavi mansion by architect Abolghasem Mohandesi, its symmetrical facade, stained glass and geometric plasterwork intact inside a walled private garden. Now a garden café where Shirazi students read until late evening.
The octagonal Zand pavilion built in 1759 as Karim Khan's audience hall and now holding his tomb. Inside are lacquered painting panels, Zand-period Qurans and manuscripts under a muqarnas ceiling roofed with a pyramid of blue tile.
The private andaruni wing of the Qavam complex, its twenty rooms panelled in mirrored and painted stucco. Now a history museum with wax figures of Shirazi scholars and poets from Hafez and Saadi to the philosopher Mullah Sadra.
A restored Qajar courtyard house on Lotfali Khan Zand St displaying setars, tars, kamanchehs, santurs and Qashqai reed pipes, with listening posts for regional Fars repertoire and short live sets by conservatory students most afternoons.
Shiraz's principal concert hall for classical Persian music, theatre and Fars folk ensembles, with a season running autumn to spring and occasional Qashqai and Bakhtiari programmes alongside radif recitals.
A 19th-century caravanserai at the southern end of the bazaar, its two-storey brick arcade wrapped around an orange-tree courtyard and pool. The cells now hold khatam marquetry cutters, gabbeh weavers and miniature painters at work.
The old quarter of narrow lanes, wind-catchers and mud-brick vaults around the Bibi Dokhtaran tomb, a 12th-century Seljuk tower with a conical dome — the least restored and most lived-in corner of historic Shiraz.
André Godard's 1952 pavilion over the grave of the 13th-century poet Saadi, azure-tiled and colonnaded in a formal garden. Steps behind it drop to a subterranean qanat pool stocked with fish, where visitors still toss coins and read aloud.
The Zand-era gateway at the Allahu Akbar pass, where travellers once left the city beneath two hand-copied Qurans set into the arch for safe passage. Terraced teahouses climb the rock beside the poet Khaju Kermani's tomb.