Kavir

Kavir National Park was established in 1964 in central Iran, on the western edge of the Dasht-e Kavir, some hundred kilometres south-east of Tehran, and protects around 4,000 km².

The landscape combines salt plains, shrub steppe of Artemisia and saxaul, arid hills and dry watercourses, in a climate of thermal extremes and minimal rainfall. It is known as Little Africa for the abundance and visibility of its large mammals in open terrain, something uncommon in western Asia.

It holds an important population of Persian onager, a subspecies of Asiatic wild ass that came to the brink of extinction, alongside goitered gazelle, mouflon and Persian leopard. It was also one of the last territories of the Asiatic cheetah, the most threatened subspecies in the world, of which a few dozen individuals remain in the whole of Iran, the only country where it survives; its presence in Kavir is today very uncertain. The park includes the caravanserai of Qasr-e Bahram, on the old Silk Road, and has been a biosphere reserve under the MAB programme since the 1970s.