Uzbekistan · Samarqand Region · Samarkand
Hishrau, Samarkand — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Canal water turns the turbines at Hishrau (Xishrov), an urban-type settlement under the city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on the right bank of the Dargʻom canal.
About Hishrau
Where to stay in Hishrau
Each area has its own feel; here's who each one suits.
Hishrau has no visitor accommodation, so the room for a night here is booked in Samarkand and the settlement seen by day. The settlement lies roughly 8 km west of the Registan in central Samarkand, and Xishrav yuli runs east from it to meet the city's outer streets. Beds belong to the old city.
Choose Hishrau for an afternoon beside the Dargʻom canal, and take the room itself in Samarkand, where the monuments stand within walking reach.
About Hishrau
What are the main landmarks in Hishrau?
Hishrau is marked above all by its hydroelectric station, the powerhouse that gave the settlement its industrial reason to exist. The Hishrau hydroelectric station stands at the southern edge of the village on the Dargʻom canal, a diversion plant with no dam of its own, and it remains the largest of the stations strung along the water in the Samarkand cascade. The canal drop does the work.
Xishrav yuli threads the houses and carries traffic east toward Samarkand. Schools, a library and a house of culture stand along it, with a mosque among the houses behind.
What is the history of Hishrau?
Hishrau was founded in 1951 and confirmed as an urban-type settlement the following year, a Soviet village built around the power station rising beside it. The first design for the Hishrau hydroelectric station dates from 1940 and a construction organisation was formed for it in 1941, but the Second World War pushed the work aside in favour of a smaller and simpler plant on the same canal. Building resumed in 1952.
The first two units came on line in 1956 and the third in 1958, their generators supplied by Westinghouse Electric, and the settlement grew around the shifts that ran them.
Where is Hishrau?
Hishrau covers roughly six square kilometres west of Samarkand. The Dargʻom canal edges it south and west, Arabxona lies north in Samarqand District, and Sattepa closes it to the east.
More areas in Samarkand
Updated September 2026