Badab-e Surt in 3D: Iran’s Orange Terraces, Explained

Two springs on a hillside in northern Iran, one salty and one loaded with iron, have between them built a staircase of stone pools coloured from cream to deep rust. Here is how to explore Badab-e Surt in 3D from your iPhone.

Badab-e Surt sits at around 1,800 metres in the Alborz mountains of Mazandaran province, in northern Iran, above a village called Orost. From a distance it looks like someone has spilled rust down a green hillside. Close up it resolves into a staircase of shallow pools, each held in by a rim of stone the water built itself, running from cream and white at the edges to a deep orange in the middle.

It is the second largest travertine terrace formation of its kind after Pamukkale in Turkey, and considerably less visited. The name is local and descriptive: *badab* for gassy or carbonated water, *surt* from the name of the area.

You can explore Badab-e Surt today, in full 3D with live Street View, right from your phone.

What makes Badab-e Surt special

Two springs feed the site, and the fact that there are two is the whole reason it looks the way it does.

The first is intensely salty. Its water is strongly mineralised and has a long local reputation as a treatment for skin complaints and rheumatism, which is the sort of claim that follows every mineral spring and is worth treating as folklore rather than medicine.

The second carries dissolved iron. When that water reaches the surface and meets the air, the iron oxidises — the same reaction that rusts a nail — and precipitates out as a reddish-orange deposit. Layer that over centuries and you get the colour.

The pools themselves are travertine, a form of limestone. Water saturated with calcium carbonate loses pressure and carbon dioxide as it emerges, can no longer hold the mineral in solution, and drops it wherever the flow slows. Deposits build first at the lip of a puddle, the lip grows into a rim, the rim holds more water, and the process repeats downhill. Nobody terraced this hillside. The water did it to itself.

How to explore Badab-e Surt in 3D

This is where MAPAS comes in. Ground-level imagery in this part of Mazandaran is patchy, so the 3D terrain does most of the work — and terrain is the point here, because the terraces are a landform rather than a building.

For a first run, try this order:

1. Search for Badab-e Surt, Iran and switch to 3D so the hillside lifts and the terraces separate from the slope around them.
2. Come in low from below, looking uphill, so the rims stack in front of each other and you can see the staircase rather than a flat stain.
3. Rotate to look down from directly above, where the pool outlines read like contour lines.
4. Follow the water uphill to the spring heads and see how short the run actually is — the whole formation is compact.
5. Pull back to the surrounding Alborz ridges and the forest below, to see how isolated the site is.
6. Trace the road down to Orost village and on toward Sari, which is the practical approach.

Beyond the terraces

• The spring heads — the two sources above the pools, close enough together to see in one frame.
• Orost village — the settlement below the site, and the last place with anything resembling services.
• The Alborz ridge line — the range that separates the Caspian lowlands from the Iranian plateau, running east to west behind the site.
• The Hyrcanian forest — the ancient broadleaf woodland on the Caspian side of the mountains, a completely different landscape half an hour away.
• Sari — the provincial capital and the usual base, around 95 kilometres north.

Why the colour changes through the day

Flat photographs of Badab-e Surt vary so much that people assume they are different places. Some show pale cream steps, some a deep burnt orange. Both are real.

Part of it is genuine variation across the site: the iron-rich water does not reach every pool equally, so the strongest colour sits where that flow concentrates, and the outer pools stay closer to white. Part of it is water level, which changes with the season and with how much of the terrace is wet.

Most of it is light. The terraces face in a direction that catches low sun, and travertine is highly reflective, so at midday the pools flatten out and wash pale while at sunset the same rims go copper. Seeing the site in 3D, with the slope and aspect correct, tells you which way it faces and therefore when the colour will be at its best — which is the sort of thing photographers usually learn by arriving at the wrong time once.

Before you go

Badab-e Surt is remote. The last stretch of road is rough, unsealed in places, and can be difficult after rain or snow; many visitors hire a driver in Sari rather than drive it themselves. There is no infrastructure at the site beyond a small entrance area, so bring water and food.

Late spring and early autumn are the reliable windows. Winter can close the access road entirely, and the site sits high enough to hold snow. Iran requires visas for most nationalities and travel there needs its own planning; check your government’s current advice and your insurance before committing to anything.

Common questions

How is Badab-e Surt different from Pamukkale?

Same process, different chemistry. Pamukkale’s water deposits almost pure white calcium carbonate; Badab-e Surt carries iron as well, so its terraces are stained orange and red. Badab-e Surt is also far smaller and far less developed.

Can you swim there?

No. The pools are shallow, fragile and protected, and walking in them damages the formation. This is a place to look at, not to bathe in.

Is MAPAS free to use?

Yes. It is free on the App Store, needs no sign-up before you start exploring, and works on iPhone and iPad.

No visa, no unsealed mountain road, no gamble on the light. Just a hillside where two springs have been quietly building a staircase for centuries, laid out in three dimensions.

Open MAPAS and climb the Badab-e Surt terraces from the bottom pool to the springs.