Tiger's Nest Monastery

Bhutanese tradition holds that in the eighth century Guru Rinpoche, the teacher who carried Buddhism across the Himalaya, flew to this cliff on the back of a tigress to subdue the local spirits that resisted the new faith. In the most common telling the tigress was his consort Yeshe Tsogyal, transformed. He meditated in a cave in the rock, and the cliff took its name from the story: Taktsang, the tiger's lair. It is the best known of thirteen caves of that name across the Tibetan Buddhist world.

In 853 his disciple Langchen Pelkyi Singye meditated here as well, and his remains are said to rest in a chorten inside the monastery. Later tradition adds Milarepa, Machig Labdrön and Thangtong Gyalpo to the great meditators who came to the cliff, although historians treat those visits as legend. What is certain is that for more than a thousand years this rock has drawn people in search of solitude, and small hermitages still cling to the ridge above the main temple.

The temple on the cliff is younger than the legend. During the Paro festival of 1692, the regent Gyalse Tenzin Rabgye led the rites standing at the mouth of the meditation cave and resolved to build a temple there. The Guru Tsengye Lhakhang, the Temple of the Guru with Eight Names, was finished in 1694, its walls painted by the monk artist Drakpa Gyatso. The small monasteries of Ugyen Tsemo and Zangdopelri on the ridge above are older still.

On 19 April 1998 fire swept through the main buildings and destroyed most of the murals and statues. The restoration, carried out under the Fourth King with traditional materials and methods, was completed in 2005, and photographs taken around 1980 are now the main record of the paintings that were lost. Taktsang today is a working monastery that joins the Drukpa Kagyu and Nyingma traditions, and Bhutanese families make the climb at weekends and on holy days to light butter lamps and pray.

The trail starts at a car park at the head of the valley, about twenty minutes from Paro town, beside a stream that turns prayer wheels as it runs. From there a broad path switchbacks up through blue pine and oak hung with pale lichen and prayer flags. After an hour or so it reaches the cafeteria, the first place the monastery comes into full view across the gorge, and the end of the line for anyone who rode up on a pony.

The path climbs on to a viewpoint level with the temples, then drops down a long stone stairway to a bridge beneath a waterfall before climbing again to the gate. Most people forget they will do those steps twice. The round trip is about eight kilometres with 500 to 650 metres of climbing, and with an hour inside the visit takes five to six hours. Birds are part of the walk: signs along the trail, put up with WWF support in 2018, describe more than thirty species, from blue magpies to laughingthrushes.