Lakes & forest
An alpine sea at 1,900 metres, a forest monastery with a vaulted refectory, and the green town Armenians call their Switzerland.
Duration
9 hours
Group
Small group, max 16
Difficulty
Easy — a stair climb at Sevanavank
Languages
EN · RU · DE · FR · IT · ES
Worth knowingSevan has had recurring blue-green algae blooms in recent summers. We check the current advisory before recommending a swim, and will say plainly if the water is not good that week.
An hour north-east of Yerevan the road climbs onto the plateau and Lake Sevan appears — roughly 1,240 square kilometres of it at 1,900 metres, one of the largest alpine lakes in Eurasia and effectively Armenia's entire surface freshwater reserve.
A flight of steps up the peninsula to two dark tuff churches, Surb Arakelots and Surb Astvatsatsin, founded in 874 by Princess Mariam, daughter of King Ashot I. This was an island until Soviet engineers drained the lake nearly twenty metres for irrigation and hydropower from the 1930s; you can still read the old waterline on the rocks below. From the top there is nothing behind the churches but seventy kilometres of open water.
Fish by the water, if you would like it. A word of honesty: the native Sevan trout, *ishkhan*, is assessed by the IUCN as extinct in the wild — what you are served is farmed, and good. Whitefish, *sig*, was introduced from Lake Ladoga in the Soviet period.
You come out of a 2.25-kilometre tunnel and the bare volcanic plateau simply stops. The road drops into beech and hornbeam so dense the light turns green. Dilijan sits at 1,500 metres inside a national park of 240 square kilometres.
Thirteen kilometres into the forest above the Aghstev valley: a complex of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, restored in the early 2010s with funding from Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi of Sharjah. The refectory of 1248, built by the architect Minas, is a single vaulted hall where two rows of arches meet overhead like an upturned hull.
A walk down Sharambeyan Street — restored craftsmen's workshops, a gallery and a small museum — and a stop at a mineral-water fountain before the drive back, arriving around 19:00.
In the price
Not included
Stops in the order we visit them. Distances are indicative, not a driving route.
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Want it privately?
Your own vehicle and guide, your own start time, and the freedom to linger where it is worth lingering.