The Badkhyz landscapes enchant. This is the pistachio plantations called savannas by the explorers and travellers from different countries for the striking resemblance to the open woodlands of the African continent. This is the picturesque gullied gorges with its wonderful sculptures created by the most patient painter – the wind. Badkhyz means the homeland of the winds. The closed salt trenches of the queer forms with the prehistoric volcanic craters towering above add some bright strokes to the picture.

The landscapes of Badkhyz are unique and inimitable even compared with the other landscapes in Eurasia. The natural complex of Badkhyz has every requisite to claim to be inscribed on the World Heritage List. This work is underway in collaboration with the UNESCO experts.

The Badkhyz Reserve is known all over the world for kulans, or onager – a wild variety of the horse. Badkhyz is the homeland for the largest kulan populations in Eurasia. It is inhabited by the rare species many of which are inscribed on the Red Data Book of Turkmenistan including goitered gazelles and leopards. Argali, foxes and hyenas come down to the drinking places in the Gyzyljar Ravine.

Pistachio savannas are one of the largest natural woodlands on the continent. The Yeroyulanduz Hollow in the southern of the Badkhyz Reserve is of particular interest for its rich geological history. In the epoch when dinosaurs inhabited the Earth there was a plain with gorgeous tropical vegetation. Later this region turned into the bosom of the sea. Then the sea stepped back forming the lagoons, which completely dried up.

It is not occasional that this part of Turkmen nature with the unique palaeontological monuments telling about the evolution in the Earth is of great interest to geologists, archaeologists, botanists and zoologists. In different times the scientists discovered fossil flowers and even fossil conifers, sequoias, fossil ostrich eggshells, the fragments of the skeletons of extinct small mammals and reptiles in and nearby the salted depression (there are about a hundred of the saline lakes).

The saline lakes in Badkhyz are the huge reserves of common salt and other mineral resources. The content and healing properties of the ancient sea waters and the Yeroyulanduz mud can be compared to those of the Mollakara Lake. There are a few natural sites of such kind in the world. The local saline streams and rivers framed with stony ledges with the huge mirrors of mica and other minerals dodge near the Yeroyulanduz Lake. The black cones of the extinct volcanoes smoothed by the time add the colours to the local landscape. The Yeroyulanduz landscapes are very popular among painters. For them it is like an Eldorado…