Nagarkot

The ridge owes its name and its first purpose to defence: Nagarkot, the fort of the city, was one of the strongpoints watching the eastern approaches to the Kathmandu Valley, guarding the routes that came up from the Banepa side and on towards Tibet. Hilltops around the valley rim were fortified under the Malla kings, and control of them mattered in 1768–69, when Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha closed in on the three royal cities and took them one after another. The army still keeps a presence on the ridge, and part of the crest is closed military ground.

For most of its history the population of the slopes was rural, Tamang and Newar farmers working terraces of maize, millet, wheat and vegetables and cutting fodder in the pine and oak woods. The royal family used the cool ridge as a summer retreat from the heat and dust of the valley below, and a road was pushed up to serve it, which is the reason a farming ridge acquired a hotel trade at all.

Foreign visitors began to arrive as Nepal opened to independent travellers and word spread of a viewpoint within easy reach of Kathmandu from which the Himalaya could be seen at dawn. Guesthouses multiplied along the crest, then hotels and resorts, and the village became a standard overnight trip from the capital and an international hill station. The 2015 earthquake damaged buildings here as across the valley rim, and the tourism collapse that followed the pandemic hit a village largely dependent on visitors; the hotels have since refilled, largely with Nepali weekend travellers as well as foreign ones.

Two kinds of life run side by side on the ridge. The hotel strip belongs to the tourist economy, staffed in part by people from elsewhere in Nepal, while the hamlets below the crest keep the rhythms of hill farming: fields worked by hand and with oxen, fodder carried in doko baskets, and households that measure the year by planting and harvest rather than by season fares.

The surrounding population is mixed. Tamang communities, Buddhist and Tibeto-Burman in language, keep gompas, prayer flags and chortens on the hillsides, and the strings of flags over the bazaar are a reminder of them. Newar families from the valley towns hold land and shops here, and Chhetri and Brahmin households from the hills farm alongside them, so Hindu and Buddhist festivals are both marked and often by the same families. Dashain and Tihar empty the village of its workers, who return to their own districts.

Visitors come for a single event — the sunrise — and the village's manners have arranged themselves around it: early breakfasts, terraces set facing north-east, and a quiet, early night. Nepali visitors come in large groups at weekends and holidays, especially in the autumn and at the April new year, which gives the ridge a picnic atmosphere quite unlike its reputation among foreign travellers for silence. Away from the hotels people are reserved and courteous, and photography of homes and family work is best asked about first.

A few thousand people live on the ridge and the slopes below it, in a settlement that belongs administratively to Changunarayan municipality in Bhaktapur district. The economy is simple: hotels, guesthouses, small restaurants and shops along the crest, farming below it, and wages sent home by family members working in Kathmandu or abroad. Many households do both, running a homestay in the season and the fields the rest of the year.

The working day is shaped by the visitors. Kitchen and reception staff are up well before dawn to open terraces and make tea, the buses and jeeps bring the day's arrivals in the afternoon, and the bazaar quietens by early evening. Farm households start earlier still, cutting fodder and milking before the children walk to school. Water is carried or pumped up the ridge and is a constant concern, as is road maintenance after monsoon landslides.

The village's fortunes rise and fall sharply with the season and with events far away: a dust-free autumn brings full rooms, a wet monsoon or a national crisis empties them. Building has spread along the ridge in recent years, and residents debate how much of the view can be built on before there is little left to come for. Mobile coverage is good, electricity reliable most of the time, and Bhaktapur, an hour down the hill, supplies schools, hospitals and markets.

There is no distinct Nagarkot cuisine; what the ridge offers is hill food with a view. The staple is daal bhaat — rice, lentil soup, a seasonal vegetable curry, greens and pickle, with meat on festival days — eaten twice daily in village households and served in every guesthouse. Local vegetables come from the terraces below: potatoes, radish, mustard greens, beans and maize, with millet in the higher fields.

Momos, the steamed or fried dumplings eaten all over Nepal, are on every menu, as is thukpa, the Tibetan noodle soup that suits a cold morning on the crest, and chow mein. Tamang households make dhindo, a stiff porridge of millet or maize flour eaten with soup and pickle, and gundruk, fermented dried leafy greens, gives the hills their characteristic sour soup. Buffalo and goat appear in curries, and dried meat, sukuti, is a bar snack as well as a way of keeping meat through the season.

Tea is the constant: strong milk tea with sugar and sometimes ginger or cardamom, poured from morning onwards in the bazaar shops. Breakfasts on hotel terraces run to eggs, toast and Tibetan bread with honey, and bottled beer and raksi, the clear home-distilled spirit of the hills, are drunk in the evenings. Because supplies come up the hill by road, menus are shorter and prices higher than in Bhaktapur below.