Kashan Rosewater Festival

While Kashan is better known to most visitors for its historic merchant houses, it's in the surrounding countryside each spring that the city's most fragrant tradition unfolds. From late April through May, the Mohammadi rose blooms in abundance across Kashan's gardens, and the Rosewater Festival celebrates the traditional distillation process that turns those blooms into golab, Persian rosewater.

Visitors can watch — and often take part in — the traditional distillation process directly, as local producers extract rosewater from freshly harvested petals using methods passed down through generations. The resulting rosewater is a genuine staple of Iranian cooking and culture, used in everything from sweets and desserts to skincare, and the festival offers a rare chance to see the entire process from garden to bottle in one visit.

Similar rosewater harvests and celebrations take place in Fars and Isfahan provinces around the same time of year, but Kashan's remains the most established, drawing visitors specifically for its rose gardens and centuries-old distillation tradition.