Gabala: Snow Capital of Azerbaijan

Gabala (Gabele in Azeri or Qabala as its sometimes known), the Caucasus Albanian capital (no relation to Albania) dating back to 4th century BC also served as an important city in the 2500yr old Silk Route. While today its mostly known for being the one place with snow in Azerbaijan, for its snow sports with the biggest Ski Resort in the Caucasus (Tufandag complex), archaeological investigations have revealed old town ruins and culture of what Gabala used to be.

How to reach Gabala from Baku
Weather and the best time to visit
5 things to do in Gabala Azerbaijan
Going around and other information tidbits
Where to Eat

Reaching Gabala (or Qabala): Drive to Shamakhi and Gabala from Baku
With one place where you will find snow in Azerbaijan, a weekend getaway in Gabala is a wonderful option. Its a beautiful 4hr drive where you will move from the land of fire to the land of ice and snow. The rolling green hills gently give way to the snow capped ones and its a lovely sight. In Baku, you will easily find options for renting a car with a chauffeur who will drive you up to Gabala and will have enough local knowledge as well.
You can easily plan for a weekend getaway in Gabala or just a day trip can be just as easily done if you start early at 7am from Baku and plan to leave back around 5pm from Gabala. The roads are not hilly after Gobustan (the town Gobustan) which you will reach in 45mins from the seven beauties.
The roads are all 2 lane roads and don’t have street lights most of the way. In April, the sky got dark by 7pm and not recommended to drive by yourself outside the city. If you hire a car and a local driver, most of them are comfortable driving in the dark closer to city. We had hired this guy for 2 days to cover places like Gobustan Petroglyphs which were either in the outskirts of Baku or day trip from there. He charged us 90USD per day.
Be super careful if you are driving yourself in the winter months as it tends to get extremely foggy with near zero visibility.
Enroute to Gabala, you can visit the Juma Mosque in Shamakhi. It is one of the biggest and the oldest mosque in Shamakhi.

Weather and the Best Time to Visit
April to June and Aug end to October is the best time to plan a weekend getaway in Gabala considering good snow in Azerbaijan during this time, low tourist traffic and great deals. Average temperatures are between 15 to 21℃ with moderate chances of precipitation. In general this could ruin your Azerbaijan experience but for Qabala, it shouldn’t be an issue at all. July Aug is the most busy months and while the average temperature ranges between 25 to 29 ℃ during this time with limited humidity, it is relatively busy due to tourist influx. To know more about Azerbaijan weather and best times to visit.

5 Things to do in Gabala Azerbaijan (Qabala):
1. Try the local street food: Azerbaijan has a lot of local fruit and vegetable based food, with many vegetarian options. Try Fruit lavash being sold by street stalls selling fresh produce, all kinds of pickled vegetables and fruit Lavash. They come in both sweet and sour versions. The round ones are factory made so ask them for the home made ones. Enroute Gabala, you will also find the place for fresh Qutab. The place is named after the owner Layla. Qutab is a cheese, vegetable or meat filled bread (more like Indian stuffed Paratha but not as crispy or thick outer layer). Made hot and fresh in front of you and served with home made butter – a must try!
I have placed this as #1 on my list of 5 things to do in Gabala Azerbaijan purely due to my love for exploring the local cuisine and food – whatever my vegetarian palate agrees with.

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2. Tugandag Winter Holiday Complex: Take the Tunfandag Telifric or cable car ride, Play with Snow and try Snow Sliding and Skiing: It turned out that this is really what we went to Gabala for. There are 4 rope lines which take you up to the highest point (xx mtrs above sea level).
Children 6yrs and younger go free. Below 12yrs it’s 16manat and for adults it’s 20manat. All the 4 rope lines are covered in this charge and you can go on these for as many times as you like. After the first 2, you reach a kind of plateau where the children can play with snow, there are a lot of restaurants, there are picnic tables outside etc. You can carry your own ski equipment or buy or rent one from there.
At the end of the very fourth one which is the highest point, you can hire a snow slide for 30manats for a whole day and slide down the snow as many times as you like. Our kids absolutely loved it just as much as they loved playing with the fresh powdery snow. We got lucky to experience a snowfall while we were there as well.
You can carry your own food and snacks. It’s not allowed to eat in while in the cable car but outside on the picnic tables, you can freely take a bite from our own grub. Additionally on the second rope line, the restaurants serve the potato on a stick, ice creams, waffles in chocolate sauce on a stick etc.

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3. Visit the Nohur Lake
It’s a nice lake in the middle of forests with a lot of activities around. One could do boating in the lake, take pictures in Russian style mink coats, play games and try local delicacies like Pomegranate juice etc.
I would recommend visiting it in summers.
In winters or around the time we went (October to April) it isn’t something the kids will enjoy as there are no one of the kind one of a kind activities, nothing like snow that they will enjoy and bitter cold doesn’t make it any better. Since we had been to a similar lake in a much more pristine setting in Kodaikanal, we did not necessarily spend too much time here.
4. Gabala Shooting Club
This is a place to try shooting with a gun or take in your hands an old Kalashnikov and shoot with it. There are separate ranges for kids and adults and the air dart ones which can be done by both kids and adults. You can buy 20 rounds of gun shots for 30manat.

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5. Gabala Archaeological Center or Savalan ASPI winery based on your preference While we were not able to visit either of them since we were doing a day trip in Gabala and we instead spent our time going to Seven beauties waterfall and Nohur Lake, the next time we are there, we’ll surely visit these two. These 2 however come highly recommended if you have time to spare in Gabala.

A lot of blogs and Tripadvisor talks about Seven Beauties waterfall. I would strongly recommend not going here if you have seen any good waterfalls. The ones I recommend in India include Jog Falls (Karnataka) and Dhuandhar Falls in Jabalpur (MP).
Even when you go all the way to the top, only 3 of the seven beauties are visible and they are also such a trickle that it seems hardly worth the effort.

Other Travel Tidbits
Washrooms: the cleanest washrooms you can find at the AZpetro petrol pumps. They usually lock these up so ask them to open it and give them back the keys.
Gabaland is the biggest open sky amusement park in Azerbaijan and if you have time, you can visit here which is sure to be a hit with kids.

Where to Eat
For lunch, we tried Lazeez that serves Indian and Arabic food.
Located in a small restaurant complex with many other restaurants serving pizza, Pakhlava, Indian and Azerbaijani cuisine, in front of the Gabala Theatre building.
What we liked: Good food, must try mix veggie, Dal Tadka and lachha paratha. We ordered the above + chana, butter naan and rice. Everything was flavourful. You could adjust the spice level by letting him know beforehand. We eat mild by Indian standards so we asked him for Medium spicy and it was just perfect
The owner is an Indian and he owns another restaurant in Baku, known as Masala Junction which we loved during our stay in Baku as well.


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