In the far west of Mongolia, where the country narrows between Russia and China and the Altai Mountains rise, there is a place that seems to belong to another world: Bayan-Ölgii, the province of the Kazakhs and the eagle hunters. Here you don't hear Mongolian but Kazakh; there are no Buddhist temples but mosques; and on the snowy slopes, men — and women and young people too — on horseback launch trained golden eagles into the air to hunt foxes and hares, in a scene of fierce beauty that has been repeated for centuries. It is the least Mongolian part of Mongolia, and one of the most fascinating.
Hunting with golden eagles is the soul of Bayan-Ölgii. The berkutchi, the eagle masters, capture and raise young birds, train them with infinite patience and hunt with them through the winters, then, according to tradition, return them to the wild. It is a unique relationship between humans and one of the most powerful birds on the planet, recognised by UNESCO as cultural heritage. Every autumn, that tradition becomes a spectacle at the Ölgii Golden Eagle Festival, where dozens of hunters compete with their eagles in front of travellers from all over the world, in a burst of colour, pride and skill.
This guide tells you how to reach this western frontier (flying to Ölgii from Ulaanbaatar), when to go depending on what you're after — the October festival, the mountain summer or the winter of real hunting —, how to visit an eagle hunter family respectfully, what to see in and around Ölgii, and how to combine Kazakh culture with the nature of the Altai. Bayan-Ölgii is far from everything, but it offers something you won't find anywhere else in Mongolia: the gaze of a golden eagle as it takes off from its hunter's arm.
The Kazakhs of Bayan-Ölgii are a Turkic, Muslim people who came to these Altai Mountains mainly between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, fleeing pressure from the Russian Empire, the Soviet regime and Chinese control over Kazakh lands, and looking for free pastures where they could keep up their nomadic life. They brought with them their language, their faith and their most emblematic tradition: hunting with golden eagles, the berkutchi, an art rooted in the steppes of Central Asia that here, in the isolation of western Mongolia, was preserved better than anywhere else. Under Mongolia's socialist regime, the province kept its Kazakh identity, with schooling in its own language. After the opening of the 1990s, many Kazakhs emigrated to Kazakhstan, but a strong core remained, and the eagle tradition, far from dying out, was revitalised as a source of cultural pride and as a tourist attraction: the Ölgii Golden Eagle Festival was born in 1999. Of the roughly 100.000 Kazakhs in western Mongolia, only a couple of hundred practise eagle hunting today, which makes this tradition a treasure as valuable as it is fragile. Our history page tells the full story of the origins of the Altai Kazakh people and the age-old art of eagle hunting.
Read the full history ↓The far west, mostly Kazakh and Muslim: land of the golden eagle hunters, whose age-old tradition is celebrated at the Golden Eagle Festival, and of the snowy peaks and glaciers of Altai Tavan Bogd, where the borders of Mongolia, Russia and China meet.
Read the history of The west and the Altai →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Bayan-Ölgii is a fascinating anomaly within Mongolia: a province where the main language isn't Mongolian but Kazakh, where you find mosques instead of Buddhist temples, and where the culture looks towards the steppes of Central Asia more than towards Ulaanbaatar. Its people, the Kazakhs, are a Turkic, Muslim people, different from the Mongols in language, religion and customs, who arrived in these Altai mountains relatively recently, mostly between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries.
The migration was no accident; it grew out of the upheavals of the time. In the traditional Kazakh lands, the expansion of the Russian Empire and, later, the forced collectivisation and famines of the Soviet regime in Kazakhstan, which in the 1930s caused a demographic catastrophe among the Kazakhs, pushed many nomadic families to seek refuge and free pastures in the mountains of western Mongolia. This remote corner let them carry on their traditional life far from state control. Chinese pressure on the Kazakh communities on the other side of the border also played a part. Over the course of a century, the Kazakhs settled in the Mongolian Altai, in what is now Bayan-Ölgii province.
Under Mongolia's socialist regime, the province held on to its Kazakh identity remarkably well: schooling in Kazakh and local customs were kept, which was unusual for a minority in a communist state. After the fall of communism and Kazakhstan's independence in 1991, many Mongolian Kazakhs emigrated to their 'historic homeland', which offered repatriation. Thousands left, though quite a few came back, disappointed or missing the Altai. Today around 100,000 Kazakhs live in western Mongolia, and Bayan-Ölgii is still a piece of Turkic, Muslim Central Asia set in the heart of the Mongol world.
If the Kazakhs brought one thing to the Altai that amazes the world today, it is their most iconic tradition: hunting with golden eagles, the berkutchi. It is one of the most spectacular forms of falconry there is, and one of the oldest. Hunting with birds of prey on the Central Asian steppes goes back thousands of years, and golden eagle hunting in particular has been documented among Turkic and Mongol peoples for at least several centuries. Isolated in the mountains of Bayan-Ölgii, the tradition has survived in a purer form than almost anywhere else.
The bond between the hunter and the eagle is extraordinary. The berkutchi captures a young eagle, traditionally a female because females are larger and more aggressive, taken from the nest or trapped in its first year. He then spends months, even years, training it with endless patience. The eagle gets used to his presence, to eating from his hand, to the horse, and to the hood that covers its eyes to keep it calm. The bird can weigh several kilos and have a wingspan of almost two metres, with talons strong enough to bring down a fox or even a young wolf. In winter the hunter rides out across the snowy mountains with the hooded eagle on his arm, protected by a thick glove. When he spots prey, such as a fox, a hare or a marmot, he removes the hood and releases the bird. The eagle dives at great speed and catches the prey, whose fur is extremely valuable against the fierce Altai cold.
The most moving part of this tradition is its ethical code. By custom, the hunter doesn't keep the eagle forever. After a few years he releases it into the wild, often leaving it a kill for its first meal in freedom, so it can breed and keep the species going. It is a relationship of respect, not ownership. UNESCO has recognised eagle hunting as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a sign of its universal value. Even so, it is fragile: of the roughly 100,000 Kazakhs in western Mongolia, only a couple of hundred still practise this art, which makes it a treasure that is as admirable as it is endangered.
For most of the 20th century, eagle hunting was simply a way of life and a means of survival for the Kazakh families of the Altai, with nothing to do with tourism. Things began to change in the late 1990s, when Mongolia, now open to the world, was looking for ways to preserve its traditions and attract visitors to remote regions. In 1999 the first Golden Eagle Festival was held on the outskirts of Ölgii. It was a competition that brought together the province's berkutchi to show off their birds' skills in front of an audience.
The idea caught on. Over the years the festival grew into one of the best-known cultural events in Central Asia and a magnet for travellers, photographers and documentary makers from all over the world. On the first weekend of every October, dozens of hunters ride past in their finest clothes (fox-fur coats, embroidered hats, decorated saddles) with their eagles perched on their arms. They compete in events that test how obedient and fast the birds are: the eagle is released from the top of a hill and has to fly to the hunter's fist or to a lure dragged behind a horse. The programme is rounded off with Kazakh horseback games such as kokpar, a kind of brutal polo played with a goat skin, and kyz kuar, the 'girl chasing' game.
The festival has had an interesting double effect. On one hand, it has turned an endangered tradition into a source of pride and income that encourages families, including young people, to keep it alive, and the number of participants has grown noticeably in recent years. On the other, it has shown the world an unforgettable image of Bayan-Ölgii, made popular by documentaries that even featured young women eagle hunters, which challenged the idea that this was a men-only art. In 2025 the October festival brought together more than sixty hunters and hundreds of visitors. As with any cultural destination that becomes popular, the challenge is for tourism to strengthen the tradition without turning it into an empty show.
The Kazakhs and their eagle hunting are only the latest chapter in a very long human story in these mountains. The Altai, whose name means 'golden mountain' according to some etymologies, is one of the oldest and most significant regions in the history of Eurasia. Over thousands of years it has been the cradle and crossroads of countless nomadic peoples. Its soil holds an exceptional archaeological record, and Bayan-Ölgii is literally scattered with it.
Its valleys and slopes hold tens of thousands of petroglyphs, carvings in the rock that range from the Bronze Age to the time of the ancient Turks, around the 6th to 8th centuries, and show animals, hunts, chariots and ritual scenes. The sites of the Mongolian Altai are listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site for their universal value. There are also burial mounds (kurgans) of the steppe cultures, 'deer stones' covered in carvings, and the striking stone statues of Turkic warriors, the 'stone men' that once stood beside the tombs. Scythians, Huns, ancient Turks, Uyghurs and Mongols followed one another or lived side by side in these mountains, and the routes linking Siberia, Central Asia and China passed through here.
All this history gives Bayan-Ölgii a depth that goes far beyond the postcard image of the hunter and his eagle. When you travel through its valleys, see the ancient petroglyphs, look up at the snowy peaks of Tavan Bogd and share tea in a Kazakh family's ger, you are touching different layers of a land where people have been living, hunting and making art since prehistoric times. At the western edge of Mongolia, between Russia, China and the golden mountains, history isn't a museum: every autumn it still takes flight from a hunter's arm into the Altai sky.
