30.2000°N, 53.1794°E.
Pasargadae was the first dynastic capital of the Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BCE on a high plain in Fars Province, southern Iran, at the foot of the Zagros range. The site preserves the limestone tomb of Cyrus — a six-stepped plinth carrying a small gabled chamber, roughly 11 metres tall — together with the remains of two palaces (the Audience Hall known as Palace S and the Residential Palace P), a monumental gatehouse called Palace R with a four-winged guardian relief, the Tall-e Takht citadel terrace, and a fourfold royal garden whose stone water channels are the earliest known chahar bagh. Construction blocks were dressed with anathyrosis joints and held by iron clamps set in lead, a technique shared with contemporary Ionian masonry. Alexander the Great visited Pasargadae in 330 BCE and ordered the tomb of Cyrus repaired after finding it looted, with an inscription restored at his command.
The whole capital was abandoned within a few generations for Persepolis, leaving its first Persian garden to outlast its first Persian king.