A forgotten Lori Province town with one of the Caucasus's great botanical gardens and gorge-top views that Armenia's tourist trail entirely skips
Stepanavan is a small town in the Lori Province of northern Armenia, in the Debed River tributary gorges at around 1,380m, about 90km north of Yerevan. It is essentially unknown to tourists — a Soviet-planned settlement with an Armenian grid of streets, some aging factories, and a surprisingly excellent botanical garden (the Stepanavan Dendropark) that covers 35 hectares of slopes above the gorge with specimen trees from across the globe, including massive sequoias that have grown to impressive size in the century since planting. The surrounding Lori plateau offers gorge walks, medieval monas…
Lori Province was historically the territory of the Kingdom of Lori, a branch of the Bagratid dynasty that controlled northern Armenia from the 9th to 11th centuries before passing to the Georgian kingdom. The region's deep gorge systems — the Debed and its tributaries — made it relatively defensible and allowed Armenian and Georgian monastic culture to survive periodic invasions. Stepanavan was developed as a Soviet industrial and agricultural center in the 1930s; the Dendropark was established in 1933 by the botanist Aleksander Manukyan, who spent 50 years developing the collection. The tow…