Mountain · Aragatsotn
Mount Aragats
Արագած
Armenia's highest mountain, a massif in Aragatsotn whose four summits stand around a deep central crater, with the classic ascent starting from Lake Kari.
Where it is
40.5233, 44.1934
Why go
Aragats is climbed for its crater as much as its height. armenia.travel describes four summits standing around a crater some 400 metres deep, the highest reaching 4,090 metres. The usual starting point is Lake Kari, and HIKEArmenia puts the classic route from the lake to the North summit at 16 km there and back, with late June to October as the season for it. That makes the top a long, strenuous day for fit walkers who are comfortable at altitude. Travellers who want the high-mountain landscape without the climb can stop at Lake Kari and walk its shore.
Base yourself nearby
City
Yerevan
Yerevan is Armenia's capital and the base for almost every trip to the country: a low-rise city built largely from pink volcanic tuff, with a dense cafe and dining culture, serious museums and manuscript collections, Soviet-modernist architecture, and monasteries, wine country and Lake Sevan all within a day's return drive.
City
Gyumri
Gyumri is Armenia's second city and its most architecturally distinctive, built from black and red volcanic tuff in a nineteenth-century merchant style that survives across more than a thousand buildings in the protected Kumayri district. It has a strong independent cultural identity, a reputation for humour and craft that Armenians take seriously, and a train link from Yerevan that makes it one of the easiest places in the country to reach without a car.
Near Mount Aragats
Fortress
Amberd Fortress
A basalt-walled fortress at 2,300 m on the southern slopes of Mount Aragats, on a triangular cape where the Arkashen and Amberd rivers meet, with the Vahramashen church of 1026 beside it.
15 km · straight-line distance; driving distance and time differ
Monastery
Harichavank
A monastery on a promontory between two canyons in Harich village near Artik, pairing a 7th-century church of Saint Grigor with a cathedral built in 1201 by the Zakaryan brothers.
19 km · straight-line distance; driving distance and time differ
Monastery
Saghmosavank Monastery
Prince Vache Vachutyan's monastery on the rim of the Kasagh river gorge at Saghmosavan, where the Church of Zion of 1215 and a gavit added by his son in 1255 face Mount Ara.
23 km · straight-line distance; driving distance and time differ
Church
Saint Hovhannes Church, Mastara
Mastara's Saint Hovhannes is an early domed church on a square plan, its four projecting apses carrying a polygonal cupola, in a village near Talin that also keeps a carved 13th-century khachkar.
27 km · straight-line distance; driving distance and time differ