The best time to visit Ganjnameh

Ganjnameh sits about five kilometres south-west of Hamedan, where the city stops and the Alvand massif begins. The name means "treasure book" — a medieval guess at the two panels of cuneiform carved into the rock by order of Darius the Great and his son Xerxes.

Late spring is the sweet spot

From mid-April to early June the snowmelt still feeds the waterfall, the foothills are green, and daytime temperatures sit in the low twenties. Autumn is a quieter second choice, dry and gold, but the falls are thin by then.

Come on a weekday morning if you can. Weekends bring domestic tourists in large numbers, and the small car park fills early.

Give yourself half a day: the inscriptions take ten minutes, but the trail above them deserves an hour or two.

In winter the road can ice over and the chairlift often closes, though the site itself stays open and the snow on the inscriptions has its own appeal.