New roads are making Iran’s remote and bucolic villages accessible to city folks on the hunt for new sanctuaries, bringing with them the ills of urbanization threatening the paradise they seek

On a recent day in Loomavesht, a village up the Asalem-Khalkal road in north Iran’s Gilan province, the men shear sheep, and the women clean the wool. A cool mist fills the air, and soon the cold weather will drive most of the villagers and their livestock down the Alborz mountains to live out the winter. During yehlagh, the old Persian name for the warm season, shepherds live here in small huts set into the rolling slopes like mushrooms, but new-fangled vacation villas tell of an approaching development boom. Up the hill, the foundations of a concrete compound commissioned by an Isfahan businessman jut out of the ground at right angles.

“Show your films Miss, show them what our village was like before the people of Tehran and Isfahan took over,” a young man tells a filmmaker who has made a series of movies here in the past decade. “Those films are proof of what this place used to look like.”

Miles from the Caspian Sea, Loomavesht is sometimes called “heaven on earth” for its bucolic charm. In the morning, cows graze by the roadside, and donkeys are a favoured mode of transport. Filmmakers like Ali Mohammad Ghassemi, Mehrdad Oskooie and Mohammad Ali Talebi worked in the area for the last two decades, and it is from their work that many heard for the first time of the traditional dress worn by the women of Talesh, of the scenic landscapes of the Asalem-Khalkhal trail. But as improved connections to the capital lure visitors to the area, Loomavesht locals are forced to make space for modernity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cow wandering across Asalem-Khalkhal road. Photograph: Tehran Bureau

Down the slope from the businessman’s villa, a young woman is making sir tareh on firewood: garlic sautéed in butter and herbs, eaten with rice. She is the daughter-in-law of a shepherd who made national news after a speeding minibus killed his entire flock. The family was forced to sell off their pastures. “Our life changed,” the woman says. “My father-in-law and his father before him had tended that flock. Now we get by with odd jobs in the city.”

When she finds out that there is a filmmaker in our group, she inquires about getting into acting. “I have a friend who has just graduated college,” she explains. “She doesn’t want to start from TV, but she wants to act. How can she do it?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aash Doogh: soup with garlic, doogh, herbs and chickpeas. Photograph: Tehran Bureau

In Kharjegil, another small village on the Asalem-Khalkhal Road, Amou Nezam’s cabin is famous for Aash Doogh: soup with garlic, doogh, herbs and chickpeas. As a side business, Amou Nezam arranges property purchases for out-of-town visitors. “I had a customer from Tehran ask me about buying property here,” says Amou Nezam. “I helped him get a 600 square meter piece of land. God be gracious, the man is an asshole. Shame on me, I made a big mistake.”

The seaside and mountain villages of north Iran have long been a popular vacation destination for city dwellers escaping traffic and pollution. The province of Mazandaran, closer to Tehran, has morphed into a land of holiday homes. “We were the primary rice producers of the country,” says a shopkeeper who is from Sari, the capital of Mazandaran. “Then we sold all the rice fields, built villas on top of them. Now, we need to import our rice.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The village of Kharjegil, Iran. Photograph: Tehran Bureau

Across Mazandaran, the landscape is peppered with cookie-cutter vacation towns. Mountainous Gilan province is further away from Tehran and more difficult to reach due to its winding roads, which has shielded it from tourist booms. But a new highway connecting Tehran to the provincial capital, Rasht, has improved access. Provisions like plumbing, gas and electricity - previously unavailable in remote villages - have driven up property values. The buying and selling fever has taken over. Even as we discuss the environmental hazards of construction booms, two in our own party inquire about purchasing land here.

Back in Kharjegil, Amou Nezam complains that his village is not yet on the gas grid. While the provincial government provided water systems and electricity five years ago, the lack of gas heating has kept property prices low. “Right now, a piece of land here goes for about 80 to 100,000 tomans per square meter,” says Amou Nezam. “It can increase tenfold, even twenty, if we have gas.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chinese-style roofs are a new aesthetic in Iran. Photograph: Tehran Bureau

As we head farther up the road, we reach Loomavesht, then Esbahooni. There were only a few wooden huts here ten years ago, dispersed across the hills. Now, dozens of concrete houses stand here displaying Chinese-style red roofs, the contemporary aesthetic of homes across the country.

Tourists come to Esbahooni for its kateh kabob - mushy northern rice with lamb kabob and fresh butter. Villagers sell their mutton and dairy to the shopkeepers, who cook the kabob and rice. A decade ago, the village consumed what it produced with little connection to the outside world. Villagers drained their sewage into cesspits and burned or composted their trash. At the restaurants, we used reusable dishes. The arrival of tourists has brought the accompanying culture of consumer goods, but there is no trash collection system in place to respond to it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mounting trash heaps come with the tourist boom. Photograph: Tehran Bureau

In Esbahooni, the hillsides are littered with plastic bags, empty soda bottles and junk food wrappers. Locals and homeowners toss them out and burn them whenever they collect in big heaps. On those days, the stink of burning plastic overtakes the cool air. A village council member blames the county, city and provincial governors as well as the Environmental Protection Organization. Each village has a dehyar, a council-elected leader, who serves as its provincial representative for four-year terms. Esbahooni’s dehyar only shows up in the summers with the tourist boom, the council member says.

As we drive further northwest to Astara, Ardabil and through the Arasbaran forest where old villages stand in clusters, we find the same symptoms of urbanization. The region is rich with forest wood, and villagers traditionally built wooden huts with the materials around them. These days, the lumber is shipped to Tehran, often illegally, and the houses are rebuilt with aluminum and concrete. “I miss the old house,” says an auto mechanic in Kharjegil. “It was cozy, it was easy to warm...we were told this method is healthier, more modern. Relatives kept telling us to change that old dehati [villager] house.”

Astara, farther northwest of Asalem, was once known for seaside houses with wooden windows and ceramic roofs. During the Ahmadinejad era, the state gave rural residents 8-million toman loans to refurbish their homes. The villagers tore down their homes, but couldn’t afford a complete reconstruction. As they built their new homes, they sold off chunks of their land to make way for vacation homes. The village homes are now made of aluminum and concrete slabs with no adorning facade, and sit next to luxurious vacation homes with elaborate exteriors.

I speak to a couple, villa owners, who are both doctors from Tehran with children in college. “We love this place,” the wife says. “We get away from the smoke, the pollution, the traffic.” When I ask her if she thinks their very presence is ruining the things she cherishes, she shrugs: “If we didn’t buy this land, someone else would.”

With development comes culture clash: villagers accustomed to hauling lumber with donkeys encounter Porsches in their backyard. “The man and woman showed up and I assumed they were a couple, but now he brings a different woman every week, God forgive,” a Kharjegil farmer complains. He is selling off another parcel of his land to afford the reconstruction of his home.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sign advertises land for sale (contact phone number digitally removed}. Photograph: Tehran Bureau

“People from the village sell their property to rent a small apartment in the city. They work in construction, sometimes as laborers on the very lands they sold,” says a Lisar villager who refuses to sell the lot he inherited from his father, despite pressure from his family. He tells me of a young man who sold some property, married and moved to Tehran two years ago to work in construction. “They rented a small basement in the south of Tehran. Their bodies were found in the winter. They died of gas poisoning.”