31.8244°N, 54.3567°E.
The Tower of Silence (Dakhma), Yazd, is a pair of circular stone-walled platforms built on twin hills south of Yazd, central Iran, used by the Zoroastrian community for excarnation — the sky burial of corpses by vultures and sun. The towers in their present form date to the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods, but the rite they served reaches back to the Avestan tradition and was practised continuously in Yazd until 1970, when the Iranian government banned the use of dakhmas and the community shifted to consecrated burial. Each tower has three concentric rings inside the outer wall — outer for men, middle for women, inner for children — sloping toward a central bone-pit. At the base sit a small khaileh prayer hall, water reservoirs, and ritual washing rooms. The hill is bare of any plant, by design.
Yazd is also still home to one of the oldest continuously burning sacred fires in the world, in a temple a few kilometres away.