Armenia with children in 9 days
Armenia is easier with children than most people assume. The distances between the places worth stopping are short by the standards of the region, Armenians are genuinely warm towards children rather than tolerant of them, the food is grilled meat and bread and fresh fruit, and the country is except
- Duration
- 9 days
- Pace
- Relaxed
- Hotel changes
- 3
- Best months
- Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep
- From
- $1,485 per person
What it is not is a country of theme parks. The honest problem with a family trip here is the same problem as any Armenia trip, only sharper: a nine-year-old will look at a fourth monastery in three days and refuse to get out of the car, and they will be right. So this route contains three monasteries and builds the rest around a cave village, a cable car, a lake you can swim in, a rope park in the forest and a bread oven.
Who it suits: families with children roughly six to fifteen. Longest single drive is about three hours, split, with two stops in it.
Your specialist: a named Armenia specialist here, with our long-standing Yerevan partner running the ground.
Day by day
Day 1: Arrive Yerevan. The flight lands in the small hours, which is the hardest single fact about family travel to Armenia and which we tell you before you book. Private transfer, twenty-five minutes, and a room held from the night before so you can go straight to bed rather than sit in a lobby with tired children. Nothing scheduled until evening.
Day 2: Yerevan slowly. A late start, because the city does not open before ten anyway. The Cascade stairway with the sculpture terraces, which children climb happily because there is something at every level, and the modern art museum at the top if it suits. Afternoon at the water: the fountains on Republic Square run a light and music show in the evening in summer and it is genuinely good. The covered GUM market for dried apricots and cheese and the vendors who will hand your children things to taste.
Day 3: Garni, Geghard and a bread oven. East out of the city, forty minutes. The Hellenistic temple at Garni, which reads as a temple to a child rather than as another church, and the basalt columns in the gorge below, reachable by 4×4 down a rough track and a good half hour of scrambling. Then Geghard, half of it cut into the rock, which is the monastery children remember because it is a cave. Lunch in a village house at Garni where lavash is baked on the wall of a clay oven and your children get to stick the dough to the wall themselves. Back to Yerevan.
Day 4: North to Dilijan. Two hours, with a stop at Lake Sevan on the way for lunch and a swim if it is July or August, when the water is warm enough. The Sevanavank churches on the peninsula are two hundred steps up, which is a manageable amount of monastery. On to Dilijan through the tunnel and into the forest, which is a different country. Two nights.
Day 5: Dilijan. The forest day. A rope and zip park in the woods, the walk to Parz Lake, which is about an hour each way on a good path and can be done by boat and by pedalo at the end, and the Haghartsin monastery in the trees, which we do in forty-five minutes and no more. Afternoon free at the hotel. If your children are older, this is the day for a Transcaucasian Trail section with a local guide.
Day 6: South to Vayots Dzor. The long day, about three hours, broken. Over the Vardenyats pass at about 7,900 feet (2,410 m) with the fourteenth-century caravanserai at the top, which is a stone building on a mountain top with a dark hall you walk through with a torch, and is more popular with children than anything else on this route. Down into the wine province and to Noravank at the end of its red gorge, where the fourteenth-century church has an external stone stair with no handrail that adults find alarming and children find excellent. Night at Yeghegnadzor or Areni.
Day 7: Tatev. Two and a half hours south. The cable car across the Vorotan gorge is about 3.5 miles (5.7 km) and takes twelve minutes, hanging over a canyon, and it is the single best thing on this trip for anyone under sixteen. The ninth-century monastery at the far end is worth an hour. Afternoon at Khndzoresk, the abandoned cave village below Goris: a path down into a valley of caves people lived in until the 1950s, and a swinging footbridge across the ravine that bounces. Night at Goris.
Day 8: Back north, with Khor Virap. Four and a half hours to Yerevan with a stop at Khor Virap in the Ararat valley, where there is a pit you climb down into on a metal ladder, which is either the highlight or the flat refusal depending on the child. Mount Ararat, 16,854 feet (5,137 m), is behind it if the day is clear. Afternoon in Yerevan, and the ice cream on Northern Avenue, which is a national institution.
Day 9: Departure. A free morning and a late checkout, then the airport. Most flights leave in the middle of the night, so we book the room for the day rather than making you sit somewhere with luggage.
What is included
Eight nights of accommodation with breakfast in rooms that genuinely fit a family, a private car or minibus with an English-speaking driver on every day of travel, licensed English-speaking guides on four days chosen for being good with children, the lavash baking lunch at Garni, the Tatev cable car, the 4×4 down into the Garni gorge, the Dilijan rope park, all site entries, a day-by-day document with honest drive times, and a WhatsApp group with your consultant and our Yerevan partner team for the whole trip.
What we would change, and when
- Younger children, under six? Cut Tatev and the southern leg entirely and add a second Dilijan night and a Sevan night. Nine days becomes a much gentler eight and nobody misses the drive.
- Teenagers who walk? Add two days and a proper Transcaucasian Trail section out of Dilijan with a mountain guide, plus the Aragats road to Kari Lake in high summer.
- Travelling outside the summer? Sevan is not swimmable, the Vardenyats pass may be closed, and the rope park shuts. A winter family trip here is Yerevan and Tsaghkadzor skiing, and it is good, but it is a different itinerary.
- Two families together? We run this with a minibus and a second guide and it works better than you would expect, because the children entertain each other on the drives.
Honest notes
Three monasteries in nine days, and two of them chosen because they are physically interesting rather than architecturally important. We will add more if you ask. We will also tell you, before you ask, that this is the most common reason a family trip to Armenia goes flat.
The arrival is genuinely difficult. Flights into Zvartnots land between two and five in the morning almost without exception. We hold the room from the previous night so that you go to bed on arrival, and we build nothing into day one. It costs an extra night and it is worth it.
Playgrounds and child-specific infrastructure are limited outside Yerevan. The compensation is that children are welcome everywhere, including restaurants at ten at night, and nobody will look at you.
Car seats are not standard here and rear seatbelts in older vehicles are sometimes not either. We specify vehicles with working belts and we can supply seats, and we would rather you asked at the enquiry stage than discovered it on day one.
The land border with Azerbaijan is closed and this route does not approach it. Armenia pairs overland with Georgia only.
Built by your named Armenia specialist, checked against notes our founder made in the field.
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