Uzbekistan Attractions: 24 Main Places to See, from Samarkand to the Aral Sea

The religious heart of the old city grew around the grave of Abu Bakr Kaffal Shashi, a tenth-century theologian; his mausoleum took its present form in 1542. Around the square stand the sixteenth-century Barakhan madrasah, the Tilla Shaykh mosque and the Muyi Muborak library, with the Hazrati Imam mosque of 2007 and its 53-metre minarets. Guidebooks still place the Uthman Quran here, but in November 2025 the manuscript moved to the Centre of Islamic Civilisation on Karasaray Street, open 9:00 to 22:00, tickets from 35,000 sums.

The ribbed blue dome of Chorsu shelters the busiest building in Tashkent: bread, melons, apricots and spices, with a gallery above. The dome was designed in 1980 and the market took shape around it through that decade; in July 2026 it became one of the components of Tashkent modernist architecture on the World Heritage List. On the hill above stands the Kukeldash madrasah of 1570, the largest medieval building in the city.

The square has carried in turn monuments to the Russian governor von Kaufman, to Stalin, to Karl Marx and, since 1994, the equestrian Amir Timur. What matters here is the city around it: Tashkent was flattened by the earthquake of 26 April 1966, which left 200,000 to 300,000 people homeless, and what went up afterwards is a textbook of Soviet modernism adapted to Central Asian sun and ornament. UNESCO inscribed a group of those buildings in July 2026 as “Tashkent Modernist Architecture: modernity and tradition in Central Asia”.

The metro is an attraction in its own right. Every station has its own theme and its own artists: marble, carved ganch, stained glass, ceramic panels, chandeliers. Kosmonavtlar, with its portraits of astronomers and cosmonauts, is on the UNESCO list of 2026, and Alisher Navoi and Mustaqillik Maydoni are the other classics.

At 375 metres this is the tallest structure in the country: built from 1978, switched on in January 1985, it carries a glazed capsule at 97 metres with an observation deck and a revolving restaurant. Hours and admission are not published officially, so check locally first.

Three madrasahs on three sides of one square: the image by which Uzbekistan is recognised. The oldest is the madrasah of Ulugh Beg, built in 1417–1420 by the astronomer-ruler himself; facing it is Sher-Dor with its tigers and sun faces, raised in 1619–1636 by the governor Yalangtush Bakhodur, who added the gold-domed Tilya-Kori of 1646–1660 on the third side. The ensemble is open daily 08:00 to 22:00, and on 10 November 2026 its official ticket system charged foreign visitors about 100,000 sums for an adult ticket, children free; the tariff is seasonal, so treat the figure as a guide.

Timur ordered the largest mosque in Central Asia after his Indian campaign and it went up in 1399–1404, with minarets up to 50 metres and a courtyard of 5,000 square metres for ten thousand people. The scale outran the technology of the day: the structure cracked almost at once, the inner arch of the portal fell in the earthquake of 1897, and the present rebuilding dates from work begun in 1974. The Siyob bazaar, recorded as far back as the eighth century, is a short walk away.

A narrow lane of tombs climbing the slope of Afrasiab, faced in blue, turquoise and white tile from the floor to the vaults. The name means “the Living King” and refers to Kusam ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad who came with the first Arab armies at the end of the seventh century. More than twenty buildings were added between the eleventh and the early twentieth century, a compressed history of Central Asian tilework. It is still a place of pilgrimage: dress modestly.

Timur began the building in 1403 for his grandson and heir Muhammad Sultan, and when he died in 1405 on a winter campaign he was buried under the same ribbed turquoise dome. The crypt also holds his sons Shah Rukh and Miran Shah, his grandson Ulugh Beg and his teacher Sayyid Baraka. In June 1941, the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov opened the tombs and reconstructed Timur’s face from the skull.

Ulugh Beg built his observatory on a hill north of the city in the 1420s and compiled there a catalogue of 1,018 stars that stayed the most accurate for two centuries; Europe learned of it when the tables were printed in Oxford in 1648. Destroyed around 1449, it was found again by the archaeologist Vasily Vyatkin in 1908. What survives is the underground part of the meridian sextant, an arc of roughly 40 metres radius cut into the rock, with a museum beside it.

Timur was born near Shahrisabz and in 1380 began a summer palace here, built by craftsmen deported from conquered cities. Two fragments of the entrance pylons survive, still covered in mosaic, and the gap between them shows how wide the arch once was. Nearby stands the Kok Gumbaz mosque, raised by Ulugh Beg in 1437 for his father Shah Rukh. The historic centre has been on the World Heritage List since 2000 and on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2016, after tourist redevelopment cleared much of the old fabric.

The Kalyan minaret of 1127, raised by the Karakhanid ruler Arslan Khan, is the oldest minaret still standing in Bukhara: a tapering brick shaft banded with a dozen patterns. It earned the nickname “tower of death”, because criminals were thrown from the top until the early twentieth century. Facing it are the sixteenth-century Kalyan mosque and the Mir-i-Arab madrasah, begun around 1530 and a working religious school again since 1945.

The citadel of the emirs was first occupied around the fifth century AD, took its present shape from the sixteenth and served as a fortress until 1920. Its sloping walls stand 16 to 20 metres high, and inside are the throne courtyard, the court mosque and the Bukhara museum-reserve, housed here since 1945; hours change with the season and are listed on bukharamuseum.uz. Across the square the Bolo Haouz mosque of 1712 rests its iwan on twenty painted columns.

A brick cube under a dome, built for the Samanid dynasty between the late ninth century and the first half of the tenth. There is no tile and no paint: the effect comes entirely from baked brick laid in basketwork patterns whose shadows shift through the day. It survived because silt buried it for centuries and archaeologists dug it out only in the twentieth.

The social centre of old Bukhara: a stone-lined pool from about 1620 shaded by ancient mulberries. Most of the city’s pools were filled in during the 1920s and 1930s; this is one of the few left. Three buildings frame it: the khanaqah of Nadir Divan-Begi of 1620, his madrasah of 1622, whose portal carries two phoenixes flying at a human face, and the Kukeldash madrasah of 1568–1569, the biggest in the city.

Three domed crossroads survive from the covered bazaars of the sixteenth century, each named for a trade: Toqi Zargaron for the jewellers, Toqi Telpak Furushon for the cap makers, Toqi Sarrafon for the money changers. They are still markets, and the walk between them crosses the old town. Beside one of them the Magoki-Attari mosque, built on the site of a Zoroastrian temple, now holds a carpet museum. Ten minutes east stands Chor Minor, a gatehouse of 1807 with four little blue-domed towers.

The walled inner town of Khiva was the first site in Uzbekistan to enter the World Heritage List, in 1990: a rectangle of about 650 by 400 metres holding 51 monumental buildings and some 250 houses inside brick walls up to ten metres high. Most visitors enter through the western Ota-Darvoza, where the ticket offices stand. It is a whole town rather than a set of monuments: madrasahs turned into workshops and hotels, bread ovens, carved doors, desert light on the brick at sunset.

The fat turquoise stump inside the west gate is the most photographed object in Khiva. Muhammad Amin Khan began it in 1852 and intended a tower of 80 metres on a base 14.5 metres across, which would have been the tallest minaret in the Islamic world; when he died in 1855 the work stopped where it stood. It is the only minaret in the region covered from top to bottom in glazed tile, and his madrasah beside it, with 125 cells, is among the largest in the country.

From outside this is a blank wall; inside is a dim hall 55 by 46 metres, roofed on more than two hundred wooden columns and lit from above. It has no portal, no dome and no courtyard, which is unique in the region. Documented from the tenth century, it was rebuilt in 1788; the columns came from older buildings, so each one carries different carving.

Kunya-Ark, the old citadel of the Khiva khans, was completed in 1688 and worked as a small town, with summer and winter mosques, a harem, a mint and a prison; its bastion is the best sunset spot inside the walls. The slim minaret of Islam Khoja, the tallest in Khiva, was built in 1908–1910 beside a deliberately tiny madrasah, so that the contrast of scale is part of the design.

The most unexpected museum in Central Asia. Igor Savitsky, an artist who came to Karakalpakstan on an expedition, founded it in 1966 and spent the rest of his life buying Russian and Uzbek avant-garde painting banned or ignored in Moscow, in a desert town where nobody looked. The museum holds some ten thousand avant-garde works beside Karakalpak folk art and opens daily except Monday, 9:00 to 18:00; figures published with the national Tourism Committee in October 2025 put a foreign adult ticket at about 100,000 sums.

Moynaq was a fishing port on the Aral Sea, the fourth-largest lake in the world in 1960, which had lost half its surface by 1999 after its rivers were taken for cotton. The town now stands about 150 kilometres from the water on the edge of a new desert, the Aralkum, and a dozen rusting trawlers sit on the sand below the old shoreline, beside a memorial and a one-room museum of the fishing fleet. The drive from Nukus takes most of a morning.

About 85 kilometres from Tashkent, a little over an hour by road, the Western Tien Shan rises straight out of the plain. Greater Chimgan reaches 3,309 metres, and below it the turquoise Charvak reservoir becomes a beach resort in summer. Chairlifts work at Chimgan, at Beldersay at 1,700 metres and at the newer Amirsoy; the ski season runs from December to mid-March. The range joined the World Heritage List in 2016.

Kokand was the capital of its own khanate, and the palace completed in 1871 for its last ruler is the showpiece of the Fergana Valley: a facade 138 metres long under a carpet of majolica tiled by masters from Rishtan. Of the original 119 rooms, two courtyards and 19 rooms survive and hold the local history museum. Kokand also opens the valley’s craft towns, Rishtan and Margilan.