Travel in Uzbekistan: Silk Road cities on a fast new line

Who visits and from where

The count has risen fast. The Wikipedia article on tourism records about 1 million international arrivals in 2016 and 7 million in 2023, and the National Statistics Committee's preliminary figure for 2025 is 11.7 million, 3.7 million more than in 2024. The committee attributed the rise to new infrastructure, the easing of visa rules, more flights and promotion abroad.

Most of those counted are neighbours. The national tourism information centre reported 6.6 million foreign visitors in 2023, of whom 4,364.8 thousand came from the neighbouring countries and 606.4 thousand from the rest of the Commonwealth of Independent States. From further away the largest groups were small by comparison:

Almost half of the visitors of 2023, 49.6%, were between 31 and 55 years old; the centre counted 723.3 thousand under 18 and 1,069.6 thousand over 50. The Registan ensemble in Samarkand drew more than 1 million visitors in 2022, according to the Wikipedia tourism article.

How the visa rules were eased

Until 2018 a tourist visa generally required a tourist voucher or an invitation from a person or organisation in Uzbekistan; only citizens of twelve countries, among them Austria, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, had a simplified procedure. From 10 February 2018 citizens of seven countries, Japan, Indonesia, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Turkey, could enter without a visa for up to 30 days, and citizens of 39 others could obtain a tourist visa within two working days without a voucher or an invitation, according to the national airline's summary of the rules.

A decree of 4 July 2018 introduced electronic visas from 15 July for citizens of 51 countries, including the United States and Canada, valid for a stay of up to 30 days within 90 days of issue and issued within two working days. The same decree allowed citizens of 101 countries to stay up to five days without a visa in transit through the international airports, with an onward air ticket, and let children under 16 travel visa-free with an accompanying adult. The list of countries has since grown: the Uzbek embassy in London lists electronic tourist visas for citizens of 77 countries and a separate visa-free regime of up to 30 days.

What Tashkent and the Fergana Valley hold

Tashkent is where most visitors arrive. The earthquake of 1966 destroyed much of it, and the rebuilding gave it the wide axes and late-Soviet public buildings that UNESCO inscribed in 2026. The ten buildings and complexes on the list, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, include museums, exhibition halls, residential ensembles and cultural and scientific institutions, nine of them along the planned axes of the centre. The older city survives in its religious buildings: the Wikipedia tourism article lists the Hazrati Imam complex, the mausoleum of Sheikh Zaynudin Bobo, the Sheikhantaur and the mausoleum of Zangiata.

In the extreme east lies the Fergana Valley, which Britannica describes as supporting old and new cities and towns and traditional rural settlements, linked by the road called the Fergana Ring, and notes for its silk. Kokand, once the capital of a khanate, and Andijan are on Uzbekistan's tentative list for World Heritage, and pockets of Tajik speech survive in Rishtan, Chust and Sokh.

What Samarkand holds

Samarkand stands in a large oasis of the Zarafshan valley, and UNESCO, which inscribed it in 2001, describes a city of three parts lying side by side. In the north-east is Afrasiab, the city founded in the seventh century BC and destroyed by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth, now an archaeological reserve with a seventh-century palace whose wall paintings survive. To the south is the city of the Timurids, with the Registan, the Bibi-Khanum mosque and mausoleum, the mosques and mausoleums of the Shakhi-Zinda, the Gur-Emir ensemble and the remains of Ulugh Beg's observatory. To the west is the town the Russians built in European style in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Timurid old town is also a place where people live, with narrow lanes, neighbourhood mosques and one- and two-storey mud-brick houses around courtyard gardens, many with painted ceilings. In Samarkand and Bukhara visitors hear Tajik, a variety of Persian, spoken alongside Uzbek. The Khovrenko winery has made wine in the city since 1927, and UNESCO's general conference has listed the city's 2,750th anniversary among the anniversaries it marks, according to the Wikipedia tourism article. Samarkand is the junction of the country's east-west railways, and the high-speed trains from Tashkent continue to Bukhara.

What Bukhara and Shahrisabz hold

UNESCO describes the historic centre of Bukhara, inscribed in 1993, as more than two thousand years old and as a medieval city whose urban fabric has remained largely intact. Its oldest monuments are the tenth-century tomb of Ismail Samani and the eleventh-century Poi-Kalyan minaret, a work of decorated brick. Most of the old town dates from the Shaybanid period of the sixteenth century: the Poi-Kalyan group, the Lyabi-Khauz ensemble and the domed bazaars at the crossroads, the Dome of the Moneychangers and the Dome of the Headgear Sellers among them. The citadel, rebuilt in the sixteenth century, has marked the civic centre from the start. Earlier survivals include most of the Magoki Attori mosque, the Chashma Ayub shrine and a madrasah built by Ulugh Beg, and the seventeenth century added the Magoki Kurns mosque of 1637 and the Abdullaziz-Khan madrasah of 1652. UNESCO notes that between the ninth and sixteenth centuries the city had over two hundred mosques and more than a hundred madrasahs, and that its value lies in the townscape as a whole more than in any single building. UNESCO notes that salinity, groundwater and termites threaten the earthen buildings.

Shahrisabz was Timur's birthplace, and its historic centre was inscribed in 2000. The foundations of the immense gate of his Ak-Sarai palace, begun in 1380, survive. The Dorus Saodat complex was built to hold the ruling family's tombs, and the covered Chor-su bazaar stands at the crossing of the two main streets. The town's baths, rebuilt on the site of fifteenth-century ones, are still in use, heated through underground conduits.

What Khiva and the far west hold

Khiva lies in the Khorezm oasis south of the Amu Darya, where the caravans took their last rest before crossing the desert to Persia. Its inner town, the Itchan Kala, was inscribed in 1990. It covers 26 hectares in a rectangle of 650 by 400 metres closed by brick walls up to ten metres high, and holds 51 monumental structures and 250 dwellings. The Djuma Mosque, built for the climate with a covered courtyard, measures 55 by 46 metres inside and is held up by 212 columns. The town also holds the Oq Mosque, the madrasahs of Alla-Kulli-Khan, Muhammad Aminkhon and Muhammad Rakhimkhon, the mausoleum of Pahlavon Mahmoud, caravanserais and markets, and two palaces built by Alla-Kulli-Khan at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Khorezm region counts nearly 300 historic monuments, according to the Wikipedia tourism article.

Beyond Khorezm lies Karakalpakstan, which reaches the former shore of the Aral Sea. In Nukus the Savitsky Museum holds a collection of avant-garde art, and tours run to the ship cemetery at Moynaq, where fishing boats lie on the dry bed of what was the sea. In the desert and on its edges the Wikipedia article lists a nature reserve in the tugai woodland of the Amu Darya, the Djeyran reserve 40 kilometres south of Bukhara, the yurt camps of Aydar Lake and more than 4,000 petroglyphs in the Sarmishsay gorge north-east of Navoi. Further west, the Southern Ustyurt National Park is one of Uzbekistan's components of the Cold Winter Deserts of Turan, a World Heritage property since 2023 and a habitat of the saiga.

How travellers move between the cities

Most international travel passes through Tashkent, whose airport is the country's main gateway; Samarkand, Bukhara, Urgench, Nukus and several cities of the Fergana Valley also have airports with international status, and Samarkand's was rebuilt in 2022 to triple its capacity. The first high-speed line in Central Asia opened between Tashkent and Samarkand in September 2011, run with Spanish-built Talgo 250 trains named Afrosiyob, and the high-speed trains now continue to Bukhara; a line to Khiva is planned. Tashkent has its own metro, opened in 1977, whose stations are elaborately decorated: Kosmonavtlar, opened in 1984, takes space flight as its theme. The metro was extended in 2001 and has four lines, and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are the only Central Asian countries with one. The national airline, Uzbekistan Airways, was created by decree on 28 January 1992 from the Soviet civil aviation department in the republic.

The main tourist route follows an older road. UNESCO's Zarafshan-Karakum Corridor, inscribed in 2023, runs 866 kilometres from the mountains along the Zarafshan and across the Karakum to the Merv oasis, and for eighteen centuries carried the trade of the Silk Roads through the valley in which Samarkand stands. Britannica describes the modern roads as needing heavy repair: the Great Uzbek Highway runs south from Tashkent to Termiz, the Zeravshan Highway joins Samarkand to Turkmenistan, and the Fergana Ring links the towns of the valley.

When the seasons suit travel

The country has hot summers and cold winters. The FAO gives July temperatures of 42 to 47 °C on the plains and 25 to 30 °C in the mountains, and January lows of minus 11 °C in the north and 2 to 3 °C in the south. Rain falls mostly between October and April, and very little from June to September. Summer temperatures often pass 40 °C, and in the coldest winters they can fall as low as minus 40 °C, according to the Wikipedia geography article. Frosts come between late September and April, which in most places allows only one crop a year, according to the FAO.

The mountains within reach of Tashkent give a different season. The Chatkal range rises to the Greater Chimgan at 3,309 metres, a starting point for walking, climbing, riding, skiing and hang-gliding, and the resorts of Chimgan, built in the Soviet period, and Amirsoy, opened in 2019, operate in winter and summer. The western Tien Shan beyond them is a World Heritage property for its wild fruit and walnut forests.

What visitors find in religious and daily life

Uzbekistan is a secular state with a Muslim majority, and the Wikipedia tourism article counts more than 160 Muslim sacred sites, among them the Hazrati Imam complex in Tashkent and the Bahauddin complex at Bukhara, one of many monuments linked to Sufism. In March 2026 the Center for Islamic Civilization opened in Tashkent with the Samarkand Codex of the Quran as its centrepiece. Wine is comparatively popular for a Muslim-majority country, in the words of the Wikipedia country article, and tea is offered to every guest; palov, by a saying UNESCO records, has to be served before a guest may leave.