Kangra & Dhauladhar · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
A long spur fort above the meeting of the Banganga and Majhi, held by the Katoch line and among the oldest continuously contested forts in northern India. Mahmud of Ghazni took its temple treasury in 1009, Jahangir's forces took the fort in 1620, Sansar Chand recovered it in 1786, and the Sikhs took it in 1809. The 1905 earthquake destroyed most of what was still standing, which is why it reads as a ruin rather than a building.
Best time: October–April.
Around fifteen shikhara temples carved downward out of a single sandstone ridge in the eighth century — not built and not assembled, but excavated, in the manner of Ellora, with a tank cut in front reflecting the whole face. The 1905 earthquake sheared off much of the sculpture. It sits on India's UNESCO tentative list rather than the inscribed list.
Best time: October–April.
A Nagara-style stone temple to Shiva as Vaidyanath, dated by its own inscriptions to 1204 and built by two merchants. It came through the 1905 earthquake essentially undamaged while masonry buildings around it fell, which is the single best argument in the valley for how the old stonework was put together.
A Shakti shrine of very long standing at Kangra town, repeatedly plundered for the wealth pilgrims left in it, flattened in 1905 and rebuilt. Its Navratri crowds come overwhelmingly from Punjab.
A temple with no image in it. Natural gas seeping from fissures in the rock burns as a set of small permanent flames, and the flames are the deity. The gilded roof is attributed to Mughal and later Sikh patronage.
A goddess temple on the Baner khad below the Dhauladhar, the third of the Kangra Shakti sites and the start of a walking route up to Dharamshala over the ridge.
Two towns stacked five hundred metres apart on one slope. The lower is a Himachal district headquarters; the upper is a British-era cantonment settlement that has been the seat of the 14th Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration since 1960. The Tsuglagkhang complex, Namgyal Monastery and the Tibetan Museum are all within a few hundred metres of each other at the top.
Best time: March–June, September–November.
A neo-Gothic church of 1852 in a deodar grove below McLeodganj, holding the grave of Lord Elgin, who died as Viceroy in 1863 and had asked to be buried where the country reminded him of Scotland. Its stained glass survived 1905; its spire did not.
A campus founded in 1988 to teach thangka painting, appliqué, wood carving and copper statue-making, built around Japanese-influenced gardens and named for the Dalai Lama's summer palace at Lhasa. It is a craft school functioning as an archive.
Billing, the take-off meadow, sits at about 2,400 m; Bir, the landing ground, at about 1,400 m. The consistent thermals off the Dhauladhar face make it one of the most reliable paragliding sites in Asia, and it hosted the Paragliding World Cup in 2015. Bir also holds a Tibetan settlement and the Palpung Sherabling monastery.
Best time: October–November, March–May.
Gardens laid out on the free-draining torrent fans between Palampur and Baijnath from 1849 onwards, with the Dhauladhar directly behind them. The area under tea is a fraction of its nineteenth-century extent, and most of what remains is smallholder-grown and processed at cooperative factories.
Best time: April–June for the flush.
A village of a few hundred people that holds an open-air theatre built by Norah Richards in the 1930s, the house and gallery of the painter Sobha Singh, and a working studio pottery. The concentration is entirely accidental and entirely durable.
The reservoir behind the Pong dam on the Beas, completed in 1974 and designated a Ramsar wetland in 2002. It takes tens of thousands of wintering waterbirds, including bar-headed geese that have crossed the Himalaya to get here, and it drowned a large tract of the valley's most productive land.
Best time: November–February.
Triund at about 2,850 m is the standard first night out of McLeodganj; above it the Indrahar pass at roughly 4,300 m crosses to Chamba on a route Gaddi flocks have used for centuries and trekkers have used for decades.
Best time: May–June, September–October.
A reservoir village on the Uhl, built for the Shanan hydroelectric scheme commissioned in the early 1930s, with a trout hatchery, a haulage trolley track climbing the ridge to Jogindernagar, and the road head for Chota Bhangal.
Sansar Chand's second seat, with a very large maidan, a hilltop fort and painted temple murals in the Kangra idiom — the closest thing to a surviving in-situ example of what the court workshops produced.
A ruined fort on the western approach with a temple inside it that holds fragmentary wall paintings, and an unusual dedication in which Krishna and Meera are worshipped together.
A cricket ground at about 1,450 m with the Dhauladhar wall filling the sightscreen end. It is the reason a great many people first see the range at all.
Places worth visiting in Kangra & Dhauladhar — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (18)