Places
Dal Lake and the floating gardensNatureSrinagar
Not open water but a shallow, worked wetland. The demb gardens are beds of matted weed and lake mud anchored on willow stakes, on which cucumber, melon and tomato are grown; the produce is sold from boats at a floating market that assembles before dawn and disperses by seven. The lake's own villages live on it, and the houseboat frontage is a narrow strip of a much older working landscape.
Best time: April–October for the gardens, January for the ice.
Mughal gardens — Shalimar, Nishat, Chashme Shahi, Pari MahalHeritageSrinagar
Terraced charbagh gardens laid out along the Zabarwan foot between 1619 and the 1630s, each built around a natural spring and stepped so that water falls from terrace to terrace under its own head, with no pumps. Nishat has twelve terraces for the signs of the zodiac; Shalimar's uppermost terrace was the private one.
Best time: April–October.
Jamia Masjid, NowhattaHeritageSrinagar
Founded at the end of the fourteenth century and rebuilt several times after fire. Its prayer hall is carried on hundreds of single deodar trunks used whole as columns — a timber structural system, not a masonry one, chosen in a valley that both grows deodar and shakes.
Khanqah-e-Moula (Shah-e-Hamadan)PilgrimageSrinagar
A wooden khanqah on the Jhelum bank associated with Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, the fourteenth-century Sufi from Hamadan whose followers are credited with the introduction of several of the valley's crafts. The interior is a catalogue of them — khatamband ceilings, papier-mâché panels and painted woodwork.
HazratbalPilgrimageSrinagar
The white marble shrine on the western shore of the Dal that houses the Moi-e-Muqaddas, displayed to congregations on specific days of the Islamic calendar. The largest single gatherings in the valley happen here.
Charar-e-ShariefPilgrimageBudgam
The shrine of Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani, Nund Rishi, and the centre of the Rishi order — a devotional tradition with roots in both Kashmiri Shaivism and Islam. The town is also where the finest kangris are made.
Martand Sun TempleHeritageAnantnag
An eighth-century temple built under Lalitaditya on a karewa with the whole valley below it, ruined but structurally legible — a colonnaded peristyle around a central shrine, in grey limestone, on a plan with no close parallel in the plains.
Best time: March–November.
AvantiporaHeritagePulwama
Two ninth-century temples built by King Avantivarman beside the Jhelum, buried under flood silt for centuries and excavated in the nineteenth. The burial is why their carving survived.
Pampore saffron karewaNaturePulwama
About 3,700 hectares of terrace that turn purple for roughly a fortnight from the last week of October. Picking is done before the sun is high and the stigmas are separated the same day, indoors, by the whole household.
Best time: Late October to mid-November.
Wular Lake and BandiporaNatureBandipora
One of the largest freshwater lakes in Asia and the Jhelum's flood buffer — it absorbs the spring melt and releases it slowly. Water chestnut harvesting from small boats is the lake's own economy.
Dachigam National ParkWildlifeSrinagar
The last stronghold of the hangul, the Kashmir stag — the only red deer in the Indian subcontinent. The park was the maharaja's game reserve, which is why an intact catchment survives so close to a city.
Best time: April–June and September–October.
GulmargHillBaramulla
A meadow at about 2,650 m ringed by fir, with a cable car onto the Afarwat ridge above 3,900 m. Its winter snow is dry and deep because the valley's precipitation arrives cold and from the west.
Best time: December–March for snow, May–September for the meadow.
Pahalgam and the Lidder valleyHillAnantnag
Where the Lidder comes out of the Kolahoi glacier — pine, grazing and the shepherd tracks over to the Sindh valley. It is also a staging point for the Amarnath pilgrimage in Shravana.
Best time: April–October.
Sonamarg and the Sindh valleyNatureGanderbal
The last meadow before the Zoji La, at the point where the valley's forest and the Ladakh rain shadow meet within a few kilometres. The road beyond it is the valley's only land link eastward and closes with the first heavy snow.
Best time: May–October.
Lolab valleyNatureKupwara
A walnut-and-rice side valley off the northern rim, less built than the Lidder and one of the places the older Kamraz speech is heard unmixed.
VerinagHeritageAnantnag
The spring at the foot of the Pir Panjal that is taken as the source of the Jhelum, enclosed in an octagonal stone tank built under Jahangir. The whole basin's drainage begins in a pool you can walk around in a minute.
Hari Parbat and the old cityUrbanSrinagar
The hill above downtown Srinagar carries a fort and, on its slopes, the Makhdoom Sahib shrine, the Chatti Padshahi gurdwara and the Sharika temple within a short walk of one another. Below it the old city runs along the Jhelum through the bridge quarters — Zaina Kadal, Habba Kadal, Fateh Kadal — where the timber-and-brick dhajji houses, the bakeries and the harissa shops are.