The story
Bam Date Festival in Bam
The Bam Date Festival celebrates the date palm harvest around Bam, a historic oasis city in Kerman province, southeastern Iran, famous for the ancient mud-brick Arg-e Bam citadel and for producing some of Iran's most prized date varieties. The festival brings orchard tours, date tastings, and craft stalls to a city whose economy and culture have long revolved around its palm groves.
Bam rose to prominence first as a stop along historic trade routes through Iran's southeastern desert, its wealth and importance eventually expressed in the Arg-e Bam, an enormous fortified citadel built up over centuries almost entirely from mud brick and adobe, a construction technique perfectly suited to the region's dry climate and one that produced, before a catastrophic earthquake in December 2003, one of the largest and best-preserved adobe structures anywhere in the world.