Lajim Hot Springs

Lajim Hot Springs draws bicarbonated mineral water in the Savadkuh district of Mazandaran province in northern Iran, where the springs emerge from the Jurassic limestone formations of the Alborz mountain range in the Lajim river valley, a landscape of extraordinary ecological richness at the transition between the temperate Hyrcanian forest of the Caspian lowland and the dry alpine zone of the high Alborz whose glacial peaks rise to over 4,000 metres within thirty kilometres of the subtropical Caspian shore. The Hyrcanian forests extending from Lajim through Azerbaijan and Gilan are the southernmost ancient deciduous forest in the world, their continuous presence on the southern slope of the Alborz since at least 40 million years ago making them a living relict of the Tertiary flora that once covered much of the northern hemisphere before the Quaternary ice ages contracted the broad-leaved forest to the narrow coastal strip between the Alborz wall and the Caspian Sea. The Hyrcanian mixed forests were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019, giving the Lajim river valley and its thermal springs a conservation significance that places the bicarbonated waters within one of the world's most ancient and most ecologically irreplaceable forest ecosystems, their therapeutic properties inseparable from the extraordinary natural heritage of the forest through which the mountain stream descends to the Caspian plain.