Shiraz sits an hour from Persepolis and was itself the capital of Iran under Karim Khan Zand from 1750. Three days trace 2,500 years: Achaemenid tribute reliefs, Sassanid rock carvings, Buyid gates and Qajar merchant houses.
Darius I began this Achaemenid ceremonial capital in 518 BC; Alexander's army burned it in 330 BC. Climb the double staircase to the Apadana reliefs, where delegations from 23 subject nations file upward carrying tribute.
Four Achaemenid kings — Darius I, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I and Darius II — lie in cross-shaped tombs cut 20m up a cliff face. Below them Sassanid reliefs show Shapur I taking the surrender of Roman emperor Valerian in 260 AD.
A small rock sanctuary 3km from Persepolis holding four Sassanid reliefs, among them Ardashir I receiving the ring of kingship from Ahura Mazda, and a long Middle Persian inscription by the Zoroastrian high priest Kartir.
The Buyid ruler Adud al-Dawla raised a gate at the Allahu Akbar pass around 950 AD; travellers leaving Shiraz passed beneath handwritten Qurans housed above the arch. The present structure is a 1949 rebuild funded by Hossein Igar.
Karim Khan Zand's 1766-67 citadel anchors the capital he made of Shiraz: 12m brick walls and four round towers, one visibly leaning after the bathhouse beneath it subsided. Qajars and then Pahlavis used it as a prison until 1971.
This octagonal 1740s pavilion in Nazar Garden served as Karim Khan's audience hall and now holds his tomb, returned to Shiraz in 1936. Inside are Zand enamelled Qurans, lacquer work and portraits from the Fath Ali Shah era.
Built 1879-86 for the Qavam ol-Molk merchant dynasty, this Qajar biruni pavilion combines mirrorwork, ceiling paintings with European motifs and a sour-orange courtyard. Pope's Asia Institute ran its research here in the 1960s.
The Qavam family's private andaruni quarters, once linked to Narenjestan by an underground passage. Its 20-room mirrored hall now houses the Fars History Museum, with wax figures of Shirazi figures from Hafez to Karim Khan.
Shiraz's oldest mosque, founded in 894 AD by the Saffarid ruler Amr ibn al-Layth. In the middle of its courtyard stands the Khodakhaneh, a 14th-century stone pavilion built to store Qurans, its walls carved in thuluth script.
The old Jewish and Sufi quarter inside the vanished city wall: mudbrick alleys, the turquoise conical dome of Bibi Dokhtaran's 12th-century mausoleum, and the Mullah Agha Baba synagogue still used by the remaining community.
Allahverdi Khan founded this Safavid seminary in 1615 for the philosopher Mulla Sadra, who taught his school of Transcendent Theosophy here. A seven-colour muqarnas portal opens onto two storeys of vaulted student cells.
Saadi died in Shiraz around 1291 after decades travelling from Anatolia to India; André Godard designed the eight-columned pavilion over his grave in 1952. A qanat-fed fish pool lies down 30 steps at the garden's edge.