Where to stay in Tashkent: the 4 neighborhoods to know in 2026

The center is the city the USSR drew after 1966, and you walk it like a plan: Amir Timur square, round, planted with oaks, with the conqueror on horseback who replaced Marx in 1994, the Hotel Uzbekistan of 1974 and its openwork concrete facade behind, the Timurid museum under its blue dome; the Broadway, the pedestrian alley of painters and ice-cream sellers leading to the theater; the Navoi opera, built in 1947 by Japanese prisoners of war, whom a plaque thanks; Independence square, three hundred meters of lawns, fountains and golden storks, and the History museum, where you see the Buddha of Fayaz-Tepa. Around them, the Kosmonavtlar and Alisher Navoi metro stations, the two finest in the city, and the avenues where Tashkenters stroll in the evening under the plane trees. Two kilometers west, Tashkent City, the new district of 2019: a park with a musical fountain, glass towers, a shopping mall and the chain palaces. You stay here to have everything on foot or one station away, for the opera and the museums, for the big hotels. The downside: Soviet-capital distances, where crossing an avenue takes five minutes, and a district without a soul in the evening outside the Broadway.

West of the center, past the Anhor canal, the old town is what remains of the Tashkent of before 1966: mahallas of low mud-brick houses turned toward a courtyard, where people still live with the door open, and, in the middle, the Chorsu bazaar, under a turquoise dome of 1980 as wide as a square: inside, the stalls of meat and dried cheese, outside, the mountains of melons, the tandir bread ovens and the plov sellers who ladle it out from eleven in the morning. Next door, the Kukeldash madrasa, the largest in the city, from the sixteenth century, and its courtyard of students. A kilometer north, the Khast Imam complex, mausoleums, madrasas and a mosque with blue minarets, with the library where the Uthman Quran rests, the seventh-century manuscript stained, tradition says, with the caliph's blood, and, more recently, the Center of Islamic Civilization and its dome. The hotels are courtyard guesthouses and small family hotels, the best rated in the city. You stay here for the bazaar at dawn, for the madrasas, for hot bread and tea, for the Uzbekistan you came to see. The downside: no luxury hotel, and a neighborhood that falls asleep with the bazaar, around seven in the evening.

North of the center, along Amir Timur avenue running toward the mountains, Yunusabad is the district of repainted 1970s apartment blocks, new business hotels and two landmarks you see from everywhere: the television tower of 1985, three hundred and seventy-five meters of steel lattice, with its revolving restaurant at the hundredth meter, and the Minor mosque of 2014, all white marble on the edge of the Anhor canal, the most photographed in the city at sunset. Between the two, the Besh Qozon, the plov center, where ten cauldrons a meter and a half wide cook the national dish for a thousand people every morning, served at noon and gone by two: you come to watch as much as to eat. Further north, the water park, Tashkentland and its rides, the exhibition center, and the canal banks where the city runs in the morning. You stay here for the new business hotels, the best rated in the city at the best price, for the plov, for families. The downside: a residential district without old stone, and the metro ten minutes' walk away depending on the address.

Southeast of the center, Mirabad and Yakkasaray are the districts you arrive through and leave from: the central station, where the Afrosiyob trains leave that put Samarkand two hours away and Bukhara four, the South station for the night trains, and the airport seven kilometers away, twenty minutes by taxi. Between the two, the embassy quarter, shaded streets and villas behind railings, the Orthodox cathedral with its blue domes, the cafés where expatriates have lunch, and the Mirabad bazaar, the one that used to be called the Russians' market: smaller than Chorsu, cleaner, with its dried fruit, its honey and its grandmothers selling the city's Korean kimchi. The hotels range from the travelers' hostel near the bazaar to the Uzbek palace with courtyards and a pool, the most beautiful in the city. You stay here for an early train or a late flight, for the calm of the embassies, for the palace. The downside: nothing to visit on the spot, and twenty minutes by metro to the old town.