If Kathmandu is the chaos and Bhaktapur the medieval town frozen in time, Patan is the art. Lalitpur, 'the city of beauty', was for centuries the most refined of the valley's three royal capitals, and it still keeps that aura today: its Durbar Square is considered the most harmonious and elegant of the three, a perfect ensemble of stone temples and wooden pagodas facing the old royal palace, now home to Nepal's best museum.
Patan is also the city of craftsmen. For more than a thousand years its workshops have cast bronze and worked metal with legendary skill: the statues of Buddhas and gods worshipped across the Himalaya came, and still come, from here, and the art of lost-wax casting is passed down from generation to generation. It is also a major centre of Newar Buddhism, with hundreds of monastery courtyards (bahals) tucked away among the houses, such as the dazzling 'Golden Temple' of Hiranya Varna Mahavihar.
This guide helps you make the most of Patan with a practical approach: what to see in Durbar Square and the unmissable Patan Museum, how to find the hidden temples and courtyards, how much the entrance fees are, how to get there from Kathmandu and why many travellers choose it as a quieter base than Thamel. It is a city for walking slowly, looking up at the wood carvings and letting a courtyard with a golden Buddha surprise you around the corner. It was damaged in the 2015 earthquake, and much of it has since been restored.
Patan is one of the oldest cities in the Kathmandu Valley; tradition considers it even older than the capital, and its founding is attributed to the Licchavi kings (4th-9th centuries), although the settlement is older still. It was a great Buddhist centre from ancient times — four stupas at its edges are attributed to the emperor Ashoka — and under the Malla dynasty, especially between the 15th and 18th centuries, it enjoyed its golden age as an independent kingdom rivalling Kathmandu and Bhaktapur. Its kings and Newar craftsmen built Durbar Square, the royal palace and dozens of temples and monastery courtyards, and made the city the artistic capital of the valley, famous for its metalwork. In 1768-1769 it was conquered, like its neighbours, by Prithvi Narayan Shah, who unified Nepal. Its story, from the Licchavis and Newar Buddhism to the Malla kingdoms and the present day, is told on our history page.
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.
The name says it all: Lalitpur means 'the city of beauty'. Patan —the popular name it goes by— is one of the oldest cities in the Kathmandu Valley, and several traditions even consider it older than the capital itself. Before it was a city of kings, it was a city of faith: the most Buddhist of the valley's three capitals, dotted with monasteries and sacred courtyards.
A deep-rooted legend says that the great Indian emperor Ashoka, the ruler who embraced Buddhism in the 3rd century BC and spread it across Asia, visited the Kathmandu Valley and ordered four great stupas to be built in Patan, one at each edge of the city, to mark its limits and protect it. Those four earthen stupas, the Ashoka Stupas, still exist and still mark the boundaries of the old city. Historians doubt that Ashoka ever came here in person, but the legend shows just how deeply Buddhism is rooted in Patan.
Documented history begins with the Licchavi dynasty (4th-9th centuries), the first to leave stone inscriptions in the valley. Under the Licchavis, Patan was already an important urban and religious centre, with temples and monasteries. Ever since, Hinduism and Buddhism have lived side by side in the city, as across the whole valley, intertwined so closely that it is sometimes hard to tell them apart: the same craftsmen carved Hindu gods and Buddhas, and the same families took part in both faiths. That peaceful, thousand-year-old coexistence is one of Patan's defining traits.
Patan's heyday came with the Malla dynasty, which ruled the valley from the 13th to the 18th century. From the 15th century, when the valley split into three independent kingdoms, Patan became a court in its own right, a rival to Kathmandu and Bhaktapur, with its own kings, its own palace and its own royal square. And in that contest of splendour, Patan shone as the valley's artistic capital.
Under the patronage of the Malla kings, Patan's Newar craftsmen reached a mastery that made them famous throughout Asia. They cast bronze using the lost-wax technique, carved wood until it looked like lace, worked stone and painted thangkas with astonishing delicacy. Their statues of Buddhas and gods travelled all over the Himalayan world, and their fame was such that, as early as the 13th century, the Newar artist Arniko —born in the valley— was summoned to the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in China, where he led the construction of temples and spread the valley's artistic style across the empire.
Patan's jewels date from this golden age: Durbar Square with its perfect line of temples, the royal palace with its courtyards (Sundari Chowk, with its exquisite carved fountain; Mul Chowk; Keshav Narayan Chowk), the stone temple of Krishna Mandir —a piece of filigree built in the 17th century by King Siddhinarsingh Malla—, the Golden Temple and dozens of Buddhist monastery-courtyards. Devout and refined, the Malla kings turned Patan into a jewel box. Even today the city keeps those craftsmen's tradition alive: in the workshops of Oku Bahal, sacred statues are still cast just as they were centuries ago.
The independent kingdom of Patan came to an abrupt end in the 18th century. While the valley's three capitals squandered their energy on rivalries, King Prithvi Narayan Shah of the principality of Gorkha, to the west, patiently closed in on the valley, strangling its trade with blockades. Kathmandu fell in 1768; that same year Patan was taken by Gorkha's troops, and in 1769 Bhaktapur, the last, surrendered. So ended the era of the three kingdoms, and the modern Kingdom of Nepal was born.
Joining the new unified kingdom meant the end of Patan's court and political independence, but not of its cultural life. The city remained a great centre of crafts and religion, and its Newar neighbourhoods kept their traditions, festivals and trades. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, however, power and modernisation were concentrated in Kathmandu, and Patan was left somewhat in its neighbour's shadow, which, paradoxically, helped preserve its traditional character.
A turning point in recent times was the restoration of the old royal palace. In an exemplary international cooperation project (led by Austria), the palace halls were restored with enormous care to house the Patan Museum, opened in 1997 and now considered the best museum in Nepal. That project set the standard for conserving the valley's heritage while respecting traditional Newar techniques and materials, and gave Patan back some of its former prestige.
To understand Patan, you need to understand Newar Buddhism, a form of Buddhism found nowhere else in the world that has survived in the Kathmandu Valley for more than a thousand years. Unlike Tibetan Buddhism, with its monasteries and celibate monks, Newar Buddhism is tantric and, above all, lay and hereditary: its priests (the Vajracharya and Shakya) marry, have families and pass their role and their trade down from father to son. Many of them are also the craftsmen who cast the sacred statues. Religion and craft are intertwined.
That is the key to Patan's hundreds of bahals, the monastery-courtyards hidden among the houses: small communal compounds, many with a Buddhist shrine in the middle, where families of craftsmen and priests have lived and worked for centuries. The most splendid is the Golden Temple (Hiranya Varna Mahavihar), covered in gilded metal, but there are dozens scattered around the city, each with its own story. Getting lost looking for them is one of the best ways to get to know the real Patan.
Metalwork is still the economic and cultural heart of the city. In neighbourhoods such as Oku Bahal, workshops still produce statues of Buddhas, bodhisattvas and Hindu gods that are shipped to monasteries and temples all over the world. This is living heritage, not museum heritage: the same art that amazed Kublai Khan in the 13th century is still practised today in the very same alleys. Alongside metalwork, wood and stone carving, thangka painting and goldsmithing live on. In that sense, Patan is much more than a collection of monuments: it is a workshop-city where sacred art has never stopped being made.
The magnitude 7.8 earthquake of 25 April 2015 also struck Patan. In its Durbar Square, several historic temples collapsed or were badly damaged, and centuries-old houses and shrines came down all over the city. Images of the royal square covered in broken bricks, alongside those from Kathmandu and Bhaktapur, showed the world how fragile this irreplaceable heritage is.
But Patan had one advantage: its craftsmen. Reconstruction drew on the living knowledge of Newar families who still master the traditional techniques of woodcarving, stonework and brick masonry. With that know-how, and with international support, the fallen temples were gradually rebuilt, brick by brick and beam by beam, respecting the original materials and methods. More than a decade later, Durbar Square has largely regained its splendour, and the rebuilding process itself became a lesson in how to keep an age-old craft alive.
Patan today is a city that blends tradition with modernity. Around Durbar Square and the bahals, everyday Newar life goes on as it always has, with its festivals, workshops and devotion; a few blocks away, in neighbourhoods such as Jhamsikhel, modern cafés, cosmopolitan restaurants and an international community are thriving. Many travellers now choose it as a calmer base with more character than the bustle of Thamel. Patan is still what its name promises: the city of beauty, a jewel box of Newar art that has survived conquests and earthquakes and carries on, with a craftsman's patience, casting gods and carving wood as it did centuries ago.
