Explore Kazakhstan

Almaty

The old capital, pressed up against the Tien Shan so closely that snow peaks close the end of half its streets. Soviet planners laid it out on a grid of tree-lined avenues and irrigation channels; the Green Bazaar, the candy-coloured Zenkov Cathedral built without nails, and a café culture unmatched in Central Asia do the rest.

Astana

A capital willed into existence on the bare steppe from 1997, and the reason people argue about Kazakhstan's architecture at all. Norman Foster built both the Khan Shatyr — a translucent tent enclosing a shopping centre and a beach — and the Pyramid of Peace, while Bayterek tower commemorates a mythical tree where a bird laid the sun as its egg.

Charyn Canyon

A gorge 150 metres deep cut into red sedimentary rock, with a section called the Valley of Castles where erosion has left free-standing towers. It is often compared to the Grand Canyon, which undersells how much stranger it looks rising out of flat steppe with no warning at all.

Kolsai Lakes

Three glacial lakes strung up a spruce-forested valley in the northern Tien Shan, each higher and colder than the last. The third sits near the Kyrgyz border at 2,700 metres and takes a long day on foot or horseback to reach.

Turkistan

The spiritual capital of the Turkic world, built around the mausoleum Timur raised over the Sufi poet Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in the 1390s. Its unfinished portal still shows the timber scaffolding sockets, and three pilgrimages here have long been held locally to equal one hajj.

Kaindy Lake

An earthquake in 1911 dammed a river and drowned a spruce forest, leaving bare trunks standing dead straight out of turquoise water. Below the surface the submerged branches are perfectly preserved by the cold, which has made it an unlikely destination for divers.

Altyn-Emel National Park

A vast desert park holding the Singing Dune, an 150-metre sand ridge that hums audibly when the sand slides, and the Aktau mountains, banded pink, white and ochre like a cut cake. Herds of kulan and goitered gazelle were reintroduced here and now roam it freely.

Big Almaty Lake

A reservoir of startling turquoise in a bowl of peaks an hour above the city, fed by glacier melt and changing colour through the season. The road up passes an observatory and ends near the Kyrgyz frontier, so bring your passport.

Mangystau

The far west, on the Caspian, where the seabed dried out and left chalk cliffs, salt flats and the great amphitheatre of Bozzhyra standing over an empty plain. At Torysh the ground is scattered with hundreds of stone spheres, and reaching any of it needs a 4x4 and a driver who knows the tracks.

Shymbulak

Kazakhstan's main ski resort, twenty-five minutes by gondola above Almaty, running to 3,200 metres with a long season and genuinely cheap lift passes. Almaty has bid for the Winter Olympics twice on the strength of it.

Baikonur Cosmodrome

The world's oldest and largest space launch facility, leased to Russia until 2050, from which Sputnik went up in 1957 and Gagarin in 1961. Visits have to be arranged months ahead through an accredited operator; the town around it is a Russian enclave inside Kazakhstan.

Aktau

A Caspian city built from scratch in the 1960s around a uranium mine and a nuclear-powered desalination plant, with streets numbered rather than named. It is the jumping-off point for Mangystau and has the only real beaches in the country.

Burabay

Marketed as the Kazakh Switzerland, which is a stretch, but the granite outcrops, pine woods and lakes rising out of the northern steppe are a genuine surprise. Okzhetpes rock and the Zhumbaktas stone in the lake carry their own legends.

Medeu

The highest-altitude speed skating rink in the world at 1,691 metres, where the thin air and glacier meltwater ice broke well over a hundred world records in the Soviet era. A dam above it was blasted into place to stop mudflows reaching Almaty.

Shymkent

The third city and the most Central Asian in feel, closer to Tashkent than to Astana in both distance and atmosphere. Its bazaars and tea houses are the draw, and it is the usual base for Turkistan and Aksu-Zhabagly.

Tamgaly

A canyon holding some 5,000 rock carvings made from the Bronze Age onwards, including sun-headed deities found almost nowhere else. The surrounding altars, settlements and burial grounds show it was a sacred site continuously for three thousand years.

Beket-Ata

An underground mosque cut into a chalk cliff in the Mangystau desert, where the 18th-century Sufi teacher Beket-Ata is buried. Pilgrims arrive by the busload, walk the last stretch down into the gorge, and stay overnight in the guesthouse before praying at dawn.

Aksu-Zhabagly Nature Reserve

The oldest protected area in Central Asia, established in 1926 in the Western Tien-Shan. Wild tulips flower across its slopes in April, including the scarlet Greig's tulip that most garden varieties descend from.

Taraz

One of the oldest cities in the country, a Silk Road stop known to the Chinese as Talas and the site of the 751 battle that stopped the Tang dynasty's westward expansion. The Aisha Bibi mausoleum outside town is covered in carved terracotta and is the finest piece of 12th-century architecture in Kazakhstan.

Lake Balkhash

A lake 600 kilometres long that is fresh at its western end and saline at its eastern, the two halves divided by a narrow strait and visibly different in colour. It is one of the largest lakes in Asia and, like the Aral, slowly shrinking.

Commissioned by Timur in 1389 over the grave of the Sufi poet whose verse carried Islam into the Turkic steppe. Work stopped when Timur died in 1405, leaving the main portal unfinished — the exposed scaffolding sockets are still there — which is precisely why the building is prized as a record of how Timurid architecture was actually constructed.

A 5,000-kilometre stretch of the Silk Road inscribed jointly with China and Kyrgyzstan in 2014, the first serial transnational listing of its kind. Eight of the thirty-three component sites lie in Kazakhstan, among them the caravan towns of Otrar, Talgar and Aktobe along the Syr Darya and the Tien-Shan foothills.

Around 5,000 carvings in a canyon south of the Chu-Ili mountains, made from the middle of the second millennium BC into the 20th century. The Bronze Age panels include sun-headed figures and masked dancers found almost nowhere else, set among altars, settlements and burial grounds that show three thousand years of continuous ritual use.

Two reserves protecting what survives of the Central Asian steppe, along with wetlands where Siberian migration routes converge. Naurzum and Korgalzhyn hold the world's northernmost flamingos and are critical to the saiga antelope, whose numbers here have collapsed and recovered more than once.

Inscribed in 2016 with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, covering mountain country between 700 and 4,500 metres. This is the wild origin of the domesticated apple and walnut, and Kazakhstan's share includes Aksu-Zhabagly, the oldest nature reserve in Central Asia.

Kazakhstan's newest inscription, added at the 48th session in Busan in July 2026 — its first in more than two decades. Five complexes on the Caspian peninsula, among them Beket-Ata and Shakpak-Ata, each pairing a mosque cut into soft rock with necropolises, sacred wells and pilgrimage routes still walked today.

A serial site shared with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, inscribed in 2023 for deserts that swing from fierce summer heat to hard winter frost — a combination found in few other arid zones. Kazakhstan contributes five components, including Barsakelmes, whose name translates roughly as the place you go and do not return from.