Manali

The Kullu valley has long been described as the end of the habitable world, and the town's name is linked to Manu, the lawgiver of Hindu myth who is said to have landed here after the flood and recreated human life; a temple to him stands in the town. For centuries the valley was ruled from Naggar and later Kullu by a line of rajas, and the settlement at the valley head was a cluster of farming hamlets on the trade route that crossed the Rohtang Pass towards Lahaul, Ladakh and Central Asia.

Sikh power reached the valley in the early 19th century, and the British took control of Kullu in 1846 as part of their settlement of the Punjab hills. They planted apple orchards, which transformed the valley economy, built a road up from the plains and used Manali as a small hill retreat; the wooden Hidimba Devi temple, already three centuries old, became its best-known landmark.

Modern Manali was made by travellers. Tibetan refugees settled here in the second half of the 20th century, and the valley became part of the overland hippie route in the 1960s, giving Old Manali and Vashisht their café culture. Indian domestic tourism then arrived on a far larger scale, and hotels spread down the valley from the 1980s onwards. The opening of the Atal Tunnel in 2020 cut the Rohtang barrier and made Manali a year-round gateway to Lahaul and Spiti.

Manali belongs to the Kullu valley, whose village religion is unusually visible. Almost every settlement has its own devta, a local deity with a temple, a hereditary medium and a palanquin carried by villagers to fairs. The greatest gathering is Kullu's Dussehra, when hundreds of these gods travel down the valley to meet the deity Raghunath, but smaller fairs happen through the year, announced by long horns, drums and the slow dancing of the nati, Himachal's line dance.

Craft is the other local mark. Kullu shawls and caps, woven in wool with bands of geometric colour at the ends, are made in cooperatives and homes throughout the valley and sold in every Manali shop; wooden architecture of alternating stone and cedar beams, known as kath-kuni, survives in Old Manali and the villages above.

Onto this is layered a floating culture of visitors. Tibetan monasteries, carpet workshops and prayer flags mark the refugee community; Old Manali's cafés, music and long-stay travellers give the town an international feel in summer; and Indian honeymooners and families fill the Mall in season, dressing in hired traditional Himachali costume for photographs against the snow. The two worlds mix without merging, and residents are used to both.

Manali is a small town — the municipality counts about 11,700 residents, although the wider valley holds many more and the seasonal population is far larger. Almost everything here depends on two things: apples and visitors. Orchards cover the terraces on both banks, harvested from August, and the fruit trade sets the rhythm of the late summer; hotels, taxis, guides and shops carry the rest of the year.

Work is highly seasonal. In May and June and again at new year the town is saturated, with traffic backed up along the single valley road and every room taken; in the deep monsoon and the late winter many businesses close and families return to farming or to jobs in the plains. Much of the service labour comes from Nepal and other Indian states.

The pressures are those of a small place carrying a very large load. Unplanned hotel building on steep, unstable ground, rubbish and sewage reaching the Beas, water shortages in peak weeks and traffic have all become public issues, and severe monsoon flooding in Himachal Pradesh in 2023 washed away riverside buildings and sections of road in the valley. Landslides and snow still isolate villages for days at a time, and the tunnel has made Lahaul, once cut off for half the year, part of everyday life.

The valley's own cooking is plain hill food built on rice, wheat and pulses. Siddu is the local speciality: a steamed leavened bread, sometimes stuffed with ground walnuts, poppy seed or lentils, eaten with ghee or a chutney of green coriander and mint. Rajma, red kidney beans from the valley's own fields, are cooked with rice and are a point of pride; babru, a deep-fried bread stuffed with black gram, appears at festivals. The formal meal is the dham, cooked by hereditary chefs and served on leaf plates, with madra of chickpeas or beans in yoghurt, sour lentils and a sweet rice dish at the end.

Trout from the valley's cold rivers appears grilled or fried on many menus. Tibetan food is everywhere — momos steamed or fried, thukpa, and butter tea — and North Indian standards, from paneer curries to chole bhature, fill the restaurants of the Mall. Old Manali's cafés cook for foreign palates, with shakshuka, pizza, banana pancakes and espresso.

Apples run through everything: fresh from roadside stalls in autumn, and made into juice, cider, jam and vinegar. Mountain herbs and buckwheat appear in village dishes, and in the cold months hot sweet chai from a glass at a bazaar stall is the most common thing anyone consumes here.