Paro Valley

For most of its history Paro faced Tibet. Traders and pilgrims came down from Phari over the Tremo La, and so did armies, which made the upper valley the front line every time Tibet invaded and made Paro rich on the trade in between. In the seventeenth century the Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, who unified Bhutan, took over an older fortress on a crag above the river and rebuilt it as Rinpung Dzong, the Fortress on a Heap of Jewels, consecrated in 1646.

Tibetan and Mongol forces attacked repeatedly in the 1640s. To mark their defeat, the first governor of Paro built Drukgyel Dzong in 1649 at the head of the valley, astride the route to Tibet, with a false entrance meant to trap attackers in a walled courtyard. It burned in 1951 and stood as a celebrated ruin until the King ordered it rebuilt in 2016, and its whitewashed walls now look up the valley towards Jomolhari once more. The governors of Paro remained among the most powerful men in Bhutan until 1907, when they joined the assembly that crowned the first king.

Kyichu Lhakhang is said to have been built in 659 by the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo, one of 108 temples raised to pin down a demoness lying across the Himalaya. Historians treat the date as tradition, but the old Jowo temple is ancient, and its statue is among the most revered in the country. Beside it stands a second temple built by Queen Ashi Kesang Choden Wangchuck in 1968, consecrated by the great teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, whose ashes rest there and whose rooms are kept as he left them.

Above Rinpung Dzong, the round watchtower of Ta Dzong was finished in 1651 and became the National Museum in 1968. Badly cracked by the 2011 earthquake, it reopened in 2020 after careful restoration, and its galleries of masks, thangkas, bronzes and arms trace more than a thousand years of Bhutanese art. Each spring the dzong hosts the Paro festival, five days of masked dances that end before sunrise on the last morning, when monks unroll a giant thangka of Guru Rinpoche over the wall and roll it away again before the sun can touch it.

Paro's wide, flat valley is one of Bhutan's rice bowls, known for its red rice, and increasingly for apples and vegetables grown for the Thimphu market. The farmhouses are some of the grandest in the country, three storeys of rammed earth and timber with painted windows, and many still keep an altar room, a loft of drying chillies and a wooden tub for the dotsho, the hot stone bath heated with river rocks and artemisia. Archery matches fill the fields at weekends, with teams singing and heckling between shots.

The valley is also changing fast. Paro town grew from fewer than 3,000 people in 2005 to more than 11,000 by 2017, and new houses and hotels are spreading over the paddy along the airport road. Staying in farmhouses, eating in village homes and walking the quieter trails above the valley keeps more of what visitors spend with the families who still farm it. The weather helps: Paro sits in a rain shadow, and outside July and August it is one of the drier valleys in Bhutan.