Unseen Iran: The Most Misunderstood Country on Earth | 4K Travel

The hottest ground ever measured on Earth. Rivers dug by hand three thousand years ago, still flowing. And a capital sinking into the ground it drained to build itself. Iran sits on a high plateau walled in by the Alborz and Zagros mountains, which take the rain before it ever reaches the interior. Inside that ring lie two great deserts, the salt crust of the Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut, where satellites have recorded ground temperatures above seventy degrees Celsius. For thousands of years, life here depended on qanats - underground channels cut by hand that carry water from the mountains by gravity alone. More than thirty thousand have been recorded across Iran. They made desert cities like Yazd possible, along with windcatcher towers, ice houses that made ice through the summer, and the Persian garden that gave the world its word for paradise. The same civilisation raised Persepolis, the royal tombs of Naqsh-e Rostam and the great square of Isfahan. Today Lake Urmia has shrunk, pumped-out aquifers are pulling the ground down south of Tehran, and the old qanats are being dug out again. This documentary travels across Iran to see how one of the oldest civilisations on Earth learned to live with almost no water. 0:00 Iran - An Introduction 1:04 Tehran, the Alborz and the Enclosed Plateau 2:47 The Kavir and Lut Deserts 6:13 Qanats - Underground Water Engineering 7:58 Yazd, Windcatchers and Ice Houses 13:40 Persian Gardens and Shushtar 19:12 Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rostam and Isfahan 25:56 Lake Urmia and the Sinking Ground 29:39 Hormuz, the Caspian Forests and the Qanat Revival #Iran #IranTravel #IranDocumentary #TravelDocumentary #4ktravel