Floating in an infinity pool on Korek Mountain, with a haze that hides a tri-point border some forty miles away, it is almost surreal to be in Iraq. The Radisson Blu Resort & Spa Korek Mountain, reached by the smooth Korek Teleferic, feels more like a mountain retreat than a regional showcase: a wood-paneled bar, a bowling alley, an arcade, and families escaping the heat. During my stay the other guests are mostly local, enjoying cooler air and family time.
Telling people I was headed to the Kurdistan Region often drew alarm. Some friends warned it was unsafe; others, more experienced travelers, called it an adventure. I learned to pick my audiences. Visit Kurdistan director Sozan Mirawdaly, a Kurdish-Canadian and former journalist, has a different mission: to dismantle myths and show both the region’s warmth and its wounds. She wants outsiders to meet Kurdistan on its own terms.
There are practical reasons to visit: dramatic landscapes and hiking, ancient and contemporary sacred sites, direct flights from hubs like Dubai and Istanbul, visa on arrival for citizens of many countries, and a population that greets visitors with genuine hospitality. The Kurdistan Region runs its own presidency, government and security forces, offering a relatively calm pocket amid regional volatility.
I arrive after a short flight from Dubai to Erbil, or Hawler as locals call it, one of the planet’s longest continuously inhabited cities. The skyline now bristles with cranes and glass towers, but at its core sits the Citadel, a UNESCO World Heritage Site being carefully restored after millennia of occupation.
Below the Citadel, Qaysari Bazaar thrums with daily life: carts heaped with white mulberries, roast watermelon seeds, families taking photos by fountains, and children pleading for ice cream. Elderly men in baggy sherwal trousers count prayer beads made from terebinth seeds. I shop for dried fruit rolls, fragrant honey and a salty, herbed goat cheese cured in skin, then try crunchy falafel with sour mango sauce at a popular café. Later, after truffle ravioli at an Italian restaurant, designer Lara Dizeyee invites me to her studio for a midnight dress-up session. Her modern takes on Kurdish silhouettes use unexpected fabrics—skulls, camouflage, Japanese florals—melding collective memory and contemporary reinvention. Lara’s family history, fleeing across the Iranian border on horseback, is a reminder that creativity here coexists with deep trauma.
Inside the Citadel I visit the Kurdish Textile Museum and meet Lolan Mustafa, whose collection of nearly 1,500 kilims and carpets preserves a craft threatened by the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s, which devastated nomadic life and cultural traditions. Dyed with natural colors like pomegranate, safflower and beetroot, the textiles are stitched with gazelles, falcons and the eight-pointed star of Ishtar. For Mustafa, safeguarding these pieces is a national duty.
My guide, Mohammed Hama Alqaderi, explains that the Citadel hill is actually a tell, a mound built by layers of successive civilizations. Hama’s family lived in the Citadel for generations; in 2023 he launched Gerrok, a travel company named for the wanderer, to share local stories.
Leaving Erbil we pass plains where Alexander the Great fought Persian forces. Pickup trucks overloaded with goats bump along roads lined with stork nests on pylons, stalls selling sun-dried apricots and fresh chickpeas eaten straight from the pod. Small shops sell local snack flavors and lemon-mint soda alongside everyday oddities. The soundtrack switches between classic rock and modern tracks as the landscape rolls by.
In the hill town of Akre, Tariq Aqrawi, a former Iraqi ambassador, has restored a ruined house and filled it with samovars, musical instruments and a gramophone. In March the town explodes with energy for Newroz, when people carry torches up the hillside to celebrate the new year. On a quieter day we retrace the same path, stepping on ancient pottery shards and exploring ruins before slipping into a cave shaped like a bird’s beak. Sunset comes with the call to prayer echoing off the rocks, and Xanedan restaurant rewards the trek with a rooftop feast of dolma served by owners whose teenage daughter learned English on YouTube.
Shush marks the beginning of the Zagros Mountain Trail, a 130-mile route launched in 2023 that links old pilgrimage ways, shepherd tracks and routes used by Peshmerga fighters. The trail stitches together religious, archaeological and cultural sites and provides work for roughly 30 communities. We do a short walk from the home of mayor Nader Tahir Mustafa, fueled by fried eggs, rich butter and thin bread dipped in tahini and honey. The hilltops rattle with goat bells and the air hums with crickets. We spy ruined fortifications and find a clear spring shaded by oleanders. Nearby, a restored 700-year-old Ezekiel synagogue stands as a reminder of the region’s once-multiethnic religious life.
The Rawandiz gorge feels cinematic: cattle graze near vertiginous drops and visitors pose beside cliffs. A visiting London family tells me how often Kurdistan is misunderstood and how they wish more people knew about its scenery, food and safety. On this trip they and I are nearly the only tourists I meet.
My final stop is Slemani, Sulaymaniyah, a city of poets and artists. Arazu Hassan Mohammed, founder of Kurdistan Outdoor, guides me through lively markets in traditional dress, navigating smoke from kebab grills and stacks of iced sodas. Over a tray of kaymak, cheeses, dibs and tahini at a local teahouse, I recharge before visiting Amna Suraka National Museum.
Amna Suraka is a former prison still scarred by bullets, with captured armor and a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein outside. It catalogues horrors visited on the Kurds—genocide, campaigns of destruction and resistance. It is painful but essential. A few streets away, the Kurd’s Heritage Museum offers a gentler atmosphere: stained glass, wooden balconies and a courtyard where backgammon pieces click and tea glasses clink, a softer companion to the prison’s gravity.
Across Kurdistan the past remains vivid—loss, deportation and suffering are never far. Yet residents are actively crafting new narratives: reviving crafts, building trails, reopening holy sites, and reigniting tourism. People like Hama, Lara, Arazu and Lolan balance remembrance and reinvention, preserving traditions while imagining fresh futures. The region is alive with stories of survival, hospitality, food, art and landscape, inviting visitors to look beyond stereotypes and witness a place rewriting its own story.