Gadabаy is located at the northern foot of the Shahdag range, at an altitude of 1460 meters, on the bank of the Mis river. Copper ore has been mined since the 19th century at the foot of the nearby Maghara mountain.
Here, the air temperature in July ranges from +10 C to +20 C, and in January it ranges from -2 C to -10 C.
Information about the city was first recorded in the source of the 13th century, in the ancient Armenian language, in the form of the Getabak fortress. The ruins of that castle are near the present Gadabay. The current settlement was built in 1863 by families who left Gazakh. The highest mountain is Goca dag, which is more than 3000 meters high.
In the middle of the 19th century, copper ore deposits were discovered in the territory of the Gadabay region, and in 1855-1856, a copper smelting plant was built by local entrepreneurs. Later, the same factory was bought by the German "Siemens" company and rebuilt in 1865. In 1883, the Galakand smelting plant was built by the "Siemens" company, and in 1879, the railway between Gadabey and Galakand, 28 km long, was built for the first time in Transcaucasia. Even today, the bridges built on that road remain as historical monuments. In 1883, the first hydroelectric power station in Tsarist Russia was built in the village of Galakand, and copper was melted by electrolysis at the Galakand copper smelting plant. At that time, kerosene lamps were used in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, the central city of Autopa, but electric light was used in Gadabey. In that period, archeological excavations were carried out by German scientists in the territory of the Gadabay region. The results of the archeological excavation were published in Berlin in the form of a scientific work called "Galakand" by the scientific publishing house "Volker Spies" of Germany. The work is kept in the Berlin State Museum.