Stepping through the gate of Bhaktapur is stepping back in time. While Kathmandu is pure chaos and noise, Bhaktapur is an almost intact medieval city. It has car-free cobbled streets, red-brick houses with carved wooden windows, grand squares where potters spin clay in the sun, and pagoda temples outlined against the sky. It is the best preserved of the valley's three royal capitals and, for many travellers, the most beautiful and authentic corner of all Nepal.
Bhaktapur (Khwopa to the Newars) was the capital of the valley between the 14th and 15th centuries. Its historic centre holds a remarkable heritage spread across three great squares. Durbar Square has the Palace of 55 Windows and the exquisite Golden Gate. Taumadhi Square is dominated by the Nyatapola, the tallest pagoda in Nepal. Dattatreya Square, in the potters' quarter, has the famous Peacock Window. Between the squares lies a maze of alleys, courtyards, fountains and temples where Newar life goes on as it always has.
This guide helps you make the most of Bhaktapur. It covers what to see in each square, why it's worth staying the night to enjoy the city without the day tours, and how much the entry fee costs (one of the most expensive in the valley, but it funds conservation). It also explains how to get there from Kathmandu, how to combine it with Nagarkot, and what to try (starting with juju dhau, the 'king's yogurt'). Bhaktapur suffered badly in the 2015 earthquake and lost several monuments, but it has been carefully restored and is still a journey to the heart of Newar culture.
Bhaktapur, the 'city of devotees', was for centuries the most powerful of the three royal cities of the Kathmandu Valley. Tradition says it was founded in the 9th century, and it reached its peak under the Malla dynasty. Between the 14th and 15th centuries it was the capital of the whole valley, and when the valley split into three kingdoms, it remained a splendid court until the 18th century. Its Malla kings built its great monuments, above all Yaksha Malla and later Bhupatindra Malla (who reigned in the early 18th century). These include the Palace of 55 Windows, the Golden Gate and the towering Nyatapola pagoda. In 1769 it was the last of the three capitals to fall to Prithvi Narayan Shah, the king of Gorkha who unified Nepal. Less modernised than Kathmandu, it kept its medieval character. The 1934 earthquake, and even more the 2015 one, caused serious damage, but the city has been restored. Our history page tells its story, from the Malla kings and Newar craftsmen to the present day.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Nepal: the three royal cities of the valley —Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur— with their Durbar squares, their Newar pagodas and a religious life that blends Hinduism and Buddhism.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it was Bhaktapur, it was Khwopa, its name in Newari. And before it became one of the three rival capitals of the Kathmandu Valley, it was the most powerful of them all. Its Sanskrit name, Bhaktapur, means 'the city of the devotees', and its whole history revolves around devotion: temples, festivals, rituals and a Newar community that has kept its traditions alive with astonishing faithfulness to this day.
Tradition places the founding of the city in the 9th century and credits it to King Ananda Malla, although people settled the valley much earlier. Like the rest of the region, Bhaktapur benefited from its position on the trade routes between India and Tibet. Goods, ideas and pilgrims passed through here, and the city grew rich on trade and on farming its fertile surroundings. Its inhabitants, the Newar, developed a sophisticated urban culture with its own language, brick-and-timber architecture, cuisine and calendar of festivals.
Unlike Kathmandu, which over the centuries became a large modern capital, Bhaktapur was left somewhat on the sidelines of the big changes. What once may have looked like backwardness is today its greatest treasure: the city kept its medieval layout, its traditional houses and its community way of life better than any other in the valley. Walking through Bhaktapur is walking through a Newar city as it was centuries ago.
Bhaktapur's moment of greatest glory came under the Malla dynasty, between the 14th and 15th centuries, when the city was the capital of the whole Kathmandu Valley and the most powerful court in the region. Its most famous king of that period, Yaksha Malla, who reigned in the 15th century, expanded his rule and made the city more beautiful. On his death, however, the kingdom was divided among his heirs, and the valley split into three independent, rival kingdoms: Bhaktapur, Kathmandu and Patan. They would compete with one another for centuries.
Far from declining, Bhaktapur remained a splendid court as a kingdom of its own. And it was precisely the rivalry between the three cities that drove an extraordinary race of artistic patronage: every king wanted his royal square and temples to outshine his neighbours'. In Bhaktapur that competition produced dazzling results, above all under Bhupatindra Malla in the early 18th century, one of the valley's great builder kings.
The monuments that define the city today date from Bhupatindra Malla's reign. They include the Golden Gate, the exquisite gilded copper doorway into the palace; the 55-Window Palace, with its long carved wooden façade; and, above all, Nyatapola. He built this five-storey pagoda, about thirty metres tall, in 1702, and it is the tallest in Nepal. The king also had himself portrayed in a statue on top of a column, kneeling and gazing at his palace forever. This was Bhaktapur's golden age, and it left behind the monuments that amaze visitors today.
The independent kingdom of Bhaktapur came to a late but unavoidable end. While the three capitals of the valley wore themselves out in rivalry, King Prithvi Narayan Shah of the principality of Gorkha, to the west, had spent years preparing his conquest of the valley. He choked its trade with blockades and took its strongholds one by one. Kathmandu fell in 1768, and Patan the same year. Bhaktapur held out a little longer, but in 1769 it was the last of the three to surrender to the Gorkha troops. Its fall completed the unification of the valley and gave birth to the modern Kingdom of Nepal.
A famous story is told about that ending. The last king of Bhaktapur, Ranajit Malla, defeated, is said to have asked for one favour only: to be allowed to retire to Varanasi, the holy city of India, and spend his last days there. The image of the old king leaving his conquered city closed more than four centuries of Malla rule in the valley.
Once Bhaktapur became part of the unified kingdom, it lost its political power, which moved to Kathmandu. Paradoxically, that political decline was a blessing for its heritage. Left out of the growth and modernisation that transformed the capital, Bhaktapur kept its medieval old town, its traditional houses and its community life better than any other city in the valley. In the centuries that followed it remained a city of farmers, potters, weavers and craftspeople, faithful to its Newar traditions.
Like the rest of the valley, Bhaktapur's history has been shaped by earthquakes. The great earthquake of 1934 was extremely powerful and caused tremendous destruction in the city. Many temples and houses collapsed, and Durbar Square, once far more crowded with monuments, lost many of its buildings. That is why it is more open and spacious today than the squares of Kathmandu and Patan. The city was rebuilt, but it never fully lost the marks of that disaster.
In the 1970s, an ambitious conservation project funded by Germany (the Bhaktapur Development Project) restored much of the historic centre, improved the infrastructure and helped preserve the city's traditional character. This was when Bhaktapur began charging foreign visitors an admission fee to pay for its upkeep, a pioneering model that is still in use. Thanks to these efforts, the city became the best-preserved example of Newar urban planning, and it earned its place on the UNESCO World Heritage List alongside the valley's other monument zones.
The magnitude 7.8 earthquake of April 2015 struck Bhaktapur again. Several temples and historic buildings collapsed, and people lost their lives. But, as in 1934, key monuments such as Nyatapola stayed standing, proof of the skill of Newar builders. The rebuilding that followed, again carried out with the help of local craftspeople, has given the city back much of its splendour.
What makes Bhaktapur unique is not just that it has kept its monuments, but that it is still a living city and not a stage set for tourists. In its squares, potters shape clay and leave it to dry in the sun as they did centuries ago. In the alleys, woodcarvers work their timber, women dry grain and chillies, people pray at small shrines and children play at the foot of the temples. Newar culture, with its language, cuisine, crafts and ritual calendar, is alive here with a strength that has faded in much of the valley.
That community life bursts out in the great festivals, above all Bisket Jatra, the Newar New Year, celebrated in April. For days, the city hauls huge wooden chariots carrying images of the gods through its steep streets. It is a crowded, noisy and sometimes dangerous celebration that brings whole neighbourhoods together, and one of the most impressive cultural spectacles in Nepal. Many other celebrations tied to the temples and religious brotherhoods follow throughout the year.
For travellers, Bhaktapur offers something almost nowhere else in the valley can: the chance to sleep inside a medieval city and really experience it. When the day tours leave at dusk, the city returns to its unhurried pace, lights come on in the brick houses and the squares are left to the people who live there. Wandering the cobbled alleys at that hour, with Nyatapola outlined against the sky and incense in the air, takes you straight to the heart of the old culture of the Kathmandu Valley. Bhaktapur, the city of the devotees, is still exactly that.
