[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

Iran's Rainbow Island Looks Like Someone Spilled Paint Across a Coastline

There's an island in the Persian Gulf where the soil is red and edible, the beaches glitter in 70 colors, and locals make bread with the dirt. Hormuz is the strangest place I've ever eaten the ground.

Hormuz Island in Iran is the only place I’ve ever scooped up a handful of the ground, been told it was a seasoning, and watched a woman bake it into flatbread an hour later. The soil here is red. Not red-ish. Red. A deep ochre-crimson that stains your fingers and, apparently, your dinner, because the islanders harvest a particular edible variety of it called “gelak” and use it as a spice and a pigment both.

I was sceptical. Then I ate the bread, smeared with a red sauce made from the same earth, and it tasted faintly mineral and savoury and completely unlike anything I’d had before. The chef just shrugged. “It’s the island.”

The whole place is like that. Geology behaving in ways geology shouldn’t, dialled up to absurd.

Hormuz is this small, salt-dome island near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and the same volcanic and mineral churn that gives it the red soil has painted the rest of it in a frankly ridiculous palette. They say seventy distinct mineral colors. I didn’t count, but I believe them. There’s a stretch of shore the guides call the Rainbow Valley where the rock runs in bands — ochre, then a chalky white, then this bruised purple, then yellow, then a streak of silver — like someone tipped over every paint pot in an art room and walked away.

And the Red Beach. The waves come in clear, hit the red sand, and roll back out a faint pink, fizzing at the edges. I stood there at sunset with my trousers rolled up and the water actually tinting around my ankles, and I just thought: who would believe me.

For a long time foreigners barely came here. Hormuz was a name on a map you mostly heard in news about shipping lanes. Lately, though, Iran has been quietly easier for curious travelers to reach — the visa situation has loosened, a sea of younger Iranian backpackers have made Hormuz their own offbeat darling, and there’s this gorgeous, mad cluster of rainbow-painted dome houses built by the architect Nader Khalili’s followers that’s become the island’s calling card.

It still feels like a secret, though. Mostly Iranians, a sprinkling of intrepid foreigners, and an island that has not been smoothed over for mass tourism yet.

You fly into Bandar Abbas, the big port city in southern Iran. From the Bandar Abbas ferry terminal it’s a short, cheap public ferry across to Hormuz — fifteen, twenty minutes on the water. Boats run regularly through the day. You don’t need to book ahead; you just turn up and pay a handful of toman.

On the island itself there are no real taxis in the western sense. You hire a tuk-tuk — gaily decorated three-wheelers driven by locals who double as guides — for a half or full day. Agree the price first. I paid the equivalent of a few dollars for hours of driving, and my driver, an older man named Abbas (yes, from Bandar Abbas, he found this very funny), took me to spots I’d never have found alone.

Try the local food, including the famous “tomshi” — bread and dishes made with the edible red soil. It’s a genuine island specialty, not a gimmick for tourists, and it’s served in family homes and tiny eateries near the village.

Stay overnight if you can. Most day-trippers ferry over and back, but Hormuz at night, away from the mainland glow, has a sky full of stars and a calm that’s worth a guesthouse bed. There are simple homestays in the village; nothing fancy, very cheap, very warm.

Dress appropriately. Iran has a dress code and as a visitor you respect it — modest clothing, women cover their hair. It’s straightforward once you’re used to it and the welcome you get in return is, in my experience, extraordinary. Iranians are some of the most hospitable people I’ve ever met, no contest, and on Hormuz I was offered tea by strangers more times than I could keep track of.

Timing matters a lot. The Persian Gulf in summer is brutal — we’re talking dangerous, sweat-through-everything heat. Go between October and April. I went in November and it was warm, breezy, perfect.

The thing about Hormuz is it scrambles your assumptions on two fronts at once. You don’t expect an island where the dirt is a recipe. And, if you’ve only ever met Iran through headlines, you don’t expect a place this gentle and this surreal and this easy to fall for. I came for the rainbow cliffs. I left mostly thinking about Abbas and his tuk-tuk and the bread.

Go while Hormuz is still a whisper rather than a hashtag — eat the red bread, soak your feet pink, and let an island full of impossible colors quietly rearrange what you thought you knew.

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