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A girl swims in the only a few centimeters deep salt water of Lake Urmia (picture from 2015)
Photo: Solmaz.Daryani
More than twenty years ago it was the sixth largest saltwater lake in the world and the largest lake in the Middle East.
Tourists visited the towns on the banks of the salty water, locals made a good living from agriculture, the soil around the lake was fertile, and the surrounding areas were habitats for flamingos, pelicans and deer.
Today Lake Urmia in the north of Iran is unrecognizable: the banks are covered with thick salt crusts, rusted boats lie on the lonely and desolate piers.
Tourists have not come for a long time, the small villages in the area look like ghost towns.
The reason: the water level has been falling sharply for 25 years - the lake is drying up.
Between 1995 and 2013 it lost around 60 percent of its surface and even more than 90 percent of its volume.
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The lake dried out so badly that ships ran aground and thick chunks of salt appeared on the pier (picture from 2018)
Photo: Solmaz.Daryani
Rising temperatures, triggered by climate change, poor water management and the construction of dams that prevent fresh water from flowing into Lake Urmia led to the disaster.
Heat and drought caused the water to evaporate in many places and huge areas to disappear under a thick layer of salt.
The salt is finally blown onto the fields by the wind and destroys fertile arable land there and thus the food sources of some animal species.
Farmers who work their fields around the lake also began to use illegal water sources as well as legal wells to irrigate their fields.
However, excessive rainfall over the past two years and a rescue program by the Iranian government have helped the lake to be rehabilitated, at least in small parts.
The Iranian photographer Solmaz Daryani has been documenting the decline of Lake Urmi since 2014.
She experienced how the lake almost completely dried up and numerous locals left their homes.
The photographer's family lived and worked in the region.
Her grandfather ran a small motel on the shore of the former tourist port town of Sharafkhaneh in the north of the lake.
In her childhood she played in her grandfather's house and on the shore of the salt lake over the summers, writes Daryani.
"I saw the changes in Lake Urmi from the very beginning. At first we didn't believe that it could shrink from year to year," says the photographer.
But then she saw how people lost their shops, gardens, guest houses and hotels around the lake.
See in the photo gallery how Lake Urmia dries up:
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