Khaju Bridge

The bridge across the Zayandeh Rud was built around 1650 under Shah Abbas II on the piers of an earlier structure. It works at once as a crossing, a dam and a place to sit: the lower tier with its twenty-three arches could be closed off with wooden sluice gates that raised the water upstream to irrigate the gardens, while the upper level is given over to pedestrians and to covered galleries with tiled decoration. In the middle, on both sides, are octagonal pavilions where, by tradition, a chair was set out for the shah and from which people looked out over the river. Its length of more than two hundred metres and the carefully judged acoustics of the vaults turned the bridge into an open-air evening club: people still gather and sing under the arches, the sound bouncing off the brick and holding longer than usual. In recent years the river has dried up for long stretches, and often there is bare stone riverbed under the arches instead of water, but the banks remain the city's main picnic spot. The best light here is an hour before sunset, when the yellow brick turns almost orange.

On the map