The flood plain between the city walls and the Tigris is filled by seven hundred hectares of market gardens that have supplied Diyarbakır with fruit and vegetables since ancient times. Walking down from Mardin Kapı to the riverside gives you a view of the whole sweep of gardens against the dark basalt wall above. The gardens produce the famous Diyarbakır watermelons as well as pomegranates, figs, and a wide range of vegetables. A footpath along the Tigris connects the area to the historic Dicle Bridge.
Hevsel Gardens
Seven hundred hectares of ancient river gardens below the city walls
A story
The Hevsel Gardens have been cultivated continuously since at least the Neolithic — making them among the world's oldest functioning agricultural landscapes. UNESCO inscribed them alongside the city walls in 2015, recognising not just the garden plots themselves but the gravity-fed irrigation channels, unchanged in their basic layout for millennia, that make them work.