The story
Lahijan Tea Festival in Lahijan
The Lahijan Tea Festival celebrates Iran's tea-growing heritage in Lahijan, Gilan province, the first city in Iran to cultivate tea and still the historic heart of the country's domestic tea industry. Set in the lush, humid hills above the Caspian Sea, the festival brings tea plantation tours, tasting, and Gilan's culinary traditions together each harvest season.
Iran's relationship with tea runs deep, a daily ritual poured from ornate samovars in homes and teahouses across the country, but for centuries that tea was entirely imported, mostly from China and later British-controlled India, until a diplomat named Mohammad Mirza, known as Kashef os-Saltaneh, smuggled tea plants and cultivation knowledge out of British India in the early twentieth century and successfully established the first Iranian tea plantations in the humid hills around Lahijan.