Islamabad

In 1959, President Ayub Khan commissioned Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis to create something audacious: a capital city from nothing. Karachi’s colonial associations and refugee pressures made it unsuitable; Pakistan needed a city that could symbolize unity and controlled growth. Doxiadis chose a site on the Pothohar Plateau, sheltered by the Margalla Hills, and designed a master plan based on his theory of ekistics, the science of human settlements. The result was a city divided into lettered and numbered sectors, each containing its own schools, parks, and markets. Streets were designed to separate cars from pedestrians. Green spaces were woven throughout. Growth was planned to occur without losing human scale.

Construction began in 1961. By 1967, Islamabad officially became the national capital. The Secretariat was designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti, the National Assembly by American Edward Durell Stone. But it is the 1986 Faisal Mosque that defines the skyline. Funded by Saudi King Faisal and designed by Turkish architect Vedat Dalokay, the mosque won an international competition with a design that abandoned traditional domes for an eight-sided concrete shell inspired by Bedouin tents. The four 90-meter minarets, influenced by Turkish tradition, frame a prayer hall that can accommodate 10,000 worshippers inside and 100,000 in the surrounding grounds. Against the dark green of the Margallas, the white mosque has become Pakistan’s most recognizable symbol.

Thirty-five kilometers northwest of Islamabad lies one of archaeology’s great treasures and one of the most significant cultural landscapes in all of South Asia. Taxila, the ancient City of Cut Stone, served as the capital of Gandhara and a renowned center of learning where Buddhist, Greek, Persian, and Indian intellectual traditions merged and evolved over more than a thousand years. Founded around 1000 BCE on trade routes connecting Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent, the city witnessed the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander’s armies in 326 BCE, the Mauryan Empire under Ashoka, the Bactrian Greeks who fused Hellenistic and Buddhist art, and the powerful Kushan dynasty before falling to the White Huns in the 5th century CE. UNESCO inscribed 18 sites across the valley as a World Heritage Site in 1980.

The oldest settlement at Bhir Mound dates to 800 BCE. Sirkap, built after Alexander’s campaigns, reveals a planned Greek city with grid-pattern streets and a remarkable shrine of the double-headed eagle where Greek Corinthian columns stand beside Buddhist stupas. But it is the monasteries that draw pilgrims and scholars. Dharmarajika Stupa, built by Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, is believed to contain actual relics of Buddha. The hilltop monastery of Jaulian preserves meditation cells and stucco sculptures with expressions so lifelike they seem to breathe across 1,800 years. Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang both recorded Taxila as a great seat of learning where thousands of students gathered from across Asia. The Taxila Museum houses approximately 7,000 artifacts, including one of the world’s finest collections of Gandharan sculpture.

The Margalla Hills are not mere scenery. This 12,605-hectare national park, part of the Himalayan biodiversity hotspot, shelters at least five common leopards within sight of Pakistan’s parliament. The Islamabad Wildlife Management Board has designated Trail 6 as a Leopard Preserve Zone with restricted access, and camera traps regularly capture these endangered cats moving through the forest. One female, nicknamed Shezadi (Princess), has become a permanent resident of the territory between Trails 4 and 6. Conservation experts consider the leopards’ presence a sign of ecosystem health: they keep wild boar and barking deer populations in balance, and their survival indicates that the forest can sustain apex predators.

Beyond the big cats, the Margallas support remarkable biodiversity. Over 300 bird species have been recorded, including the striking Kaleej pheasant whose population has recovered after decades of poaching pressure. Thirty mammal species inhabit the hills, from pangolins and Indian flying foxes to golden jackals and rhesus macaques. The grey goral, a goat-antelope unique to the Himalayas, was once common here, though recent sightings have become rare. Hiking trails wind through subtropical broadleaf forest to viewpoints like Daman-e-Koh and the higher Pir Sohawa, offering visitors the remarkable experience of genuine wilderness minutes from a capital of over two million people. The Shah Allah Ditta caves on Trail 7 preserve Buddhist-era murals dating back 2,400 years.