Laft

Laft (Persian: لافت‎‎, also Romanized as Lāft; also known as Bandar-e Lāft, Lāft-e Now, and Yāft) is a village in Howmeh Rural District, in the Central District of Qeshm County, Hormozgan Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 3,899, in 765 families. Laft is more than 2000 years old. It is located on Qeshm island in the Straits of Hormuz, to the south-west of Bandar Abbas.

Description

Laft is surrounded by Hara forests (mangroves). The most obvious architectural features of the houses is their variously-sized windbreaks (windtowers). The people of Laft constructed them for making the inner space of the building cool in summer. The buildings of Laft are constructed close to each other, with winding and narrow alleys.

Historical monuments in Laft include Naderi Castle, a square-shaped castle with four towers; two rounded dome-like reservoirs; a burial ground in which some of the inscriptions are dated to 1000 years ago; and the shrines of Seyed Hassan Mansor, Sheikh Tousi, and Sheikh AndarAbi. Behind the castle, in a crater, 366 Tala (Golden) wells were dug for gathering the rainwater, one for each day of the leap year in Iran. Some historians believe that these wells date from the time of the Achaemenian and Sassanian dynasties.