Leh

Top things to do in Leh

1. 01

   Leh Palace - the nine-storey ruin above the old town

   history scenic 👍 Popular

   A great leaning slab of mud brick, stone and poplar beams stacked up the hillside over the bazaar, raised in the early 1600s by Sengge Namgyal and built on the same stepped principle as the Potala in Lhasa, which it predates. The royal family left it for Stok when the Dogras took Ladakh in the 1840s and it stood empty for a century; restoration has made the galleries, prayer rooms and staircases walkable, though much of the interior is dark and bare. Go for the structure and for the roof, which gives you the whole valley: the town below, the Indus, and the Stok range with Stok Kangri behind it. The climb from the bazaar is short and steep, which on your first day or two is not a small thing.

2. 02

   Namgyal Tsemo Gompa - the ridge above the palace

   history scenic

   Higher again, on the crest behind the palace, a red temple holding a three-storey seated Maitreya, a smaller Gonkhang of protector deities, and the ruins of the victory fort that Tashi Namgyal built in the 16th century after seeing off a raid. Prayer flags run the whole spine of the ridge. A monk comes up to open the temples early and again in the evening, and there is a steep footpath from the old town or a road round the back for taxis. This is the best sunset in Leh and the hardest-earned walk in town, so leave it until you have been up here a few days.

3. 03

   Shanti Stupa - the white dome over Changspa

   scenic culture arts

   A modern peace pagoda on the hill above the guesthouse lanes, built in the 1980s by a Japanese Buddhist order as one of a global series and consecrated by the Dalai Lama, with gilded relief panels of the Buddha's life set around the drum. The point is the terrace: Leh laid out below with the palace on its rock, the Indus valley running east, and the Stok range catching the last light straight across. There is a long flight of steps up from Changspa or a road that taxis take, and the steps are a fair measure of how your acclimatisation is going.

4. 04

   Leh Old Town - the restored lanes under the palace

   history culture arts

   The warren of mud-brick houses between the bazaar and the palace ramp is the oldest part of town and was close to collapse until heritage groups began stabilising it house by house, using the original mud, willow and poplar rather than concrete. Walk up through the stepped alleys past carved doorways, chortens built over the path so you pass through them, and the Jama Masjid at the head of the main street, a legacy of the settlement with Mughal Kashmir. A stone tower museum in a walled garden below the palace tells the Central Asian trade story, room by room, for each of the countries Leh traded with.

5. 05

   Main Bazaar - Ladakhi produce and Central Asian leftovers

   shopping culture arts

   The wide pedestrianised main street is where the caravan trade used to unload, and it still functions as the region's marketplace. Ladakhi women sit along one side behind pyramids of greens, turnips, apricots and walnuts brought in from the villages; the stalls behind them sell pashmina, prayer wheels, thangkas and Tibetan silver, some of it genuinely from here and much of it not. The refugee market and the surrounding lanes carry the Tibetan trade. Best early in the morning, when the produce sellers arrive and the light comes over the ridge onto the palace.

6. 06

   Thiksey Monastery - dawn prayers under the Maitreya

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   Twelve tiers of whitewashed buildings climbing a hill in the Indus valley southeast of town, so like the Potala in silhouette that it is the photograph most people take home from Ladakh. It is a large working Gelugpa house with monks in residence, and the reason to come is the morning puja: conches from the roof at first light, then horns, drums and chanting in a hall thick with butter lamp smoke, with tea poured for anyone sitting quietly at the back. The two-storey seated Maitreya in its own temple was installed for a visit by the Dalai Lama and fills the room to the ceiling. Arrive before sunrise or not at all, and dress and behave as you would in any working monastery.

7. 07

   Hemis Monastery - the wealthiest gompa in Ladakh

   culture arts history

   Hidden in a side gorge off the Indus so that raiding parties rode past it, Hemis was re-established under Sengge Namgyal in the 1630s and became the richest and most powerful of the Drukpa houses. The museum below the courtyard is the best in Ladakh, with thangkas, ritual bronzes and the monastery's own treasures properly displayed, and the enormous appliqued thangka that is unfurled across the facade only once every twelve years lives here. The courtyard is where the masked dances honouring Padmasambhava are held on the summer festival days set by the Tibetan calendar, which is the busiest the place ever gets.

8. 08

   Alchi Choskor - the oldest paintings in Ladakh

   history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   A cluster of small temples on flat ground beside the Indus downriver from Leh, unusual for being built on the valley floor rather than a crag, and unique for what survives inside. The murals and clay sculpture date from the 11th and 12th centuries and were made by Kashmiri artists, so the style is Indian rather than Tibetan: slender bodhisattvas, dense mandalas, and on the three-storey Sumtsek figures whose painted robes carry miniature scenes of court life, hunts and dress from a world that has otherwise vanished. The interiors are very dark and nothing is lit for you, photography is not allowed, and the caretaker opens the doors on his own rhythm. Take a torch and give it real time.

9. 09

   Khardung La - the pass on the road north

   adventure scenic 👍 Popular

   The road out of Leh to the Nubra valley climbs to a saddle at roughly 5,359 m in a couple of hours of switchbacks, and the summit is a scrum of prayer flags, army signage, selfie queues and a tea hut. The board at the top claims a height that surveys do not support, and the old title of highest motorable road has since passed to newer routes in eastern Ladakh, but the drive is still extraordinary and the drop into Nubra beyond it more so. Permits are checked at the barrier on the way up. Do not attempt it in your first two days, do not sleep at the top, and keep the stop short: this is high enough that healthy people get into trouble standing still.

10. 10

    Pangong Tso - the lake that ends in China

    scenic nature wildlife 👍 Popular

    A long finger of brackish water at about 4,250 m east of Leh, reached over the Chang La pass, roughly two-thirds of it across the line in Tibet. The colour is the thing: it shifts through the day from steel to turquoise to a deep ink blue against bare ochre hills, and it can do all three in an hour. A Bollywood film shot its closing scenes on the shore and the crowds, the camps and the props have followed ever since, so the near end at Spangmik is busy and the villages further along at Man and Merak are calmer. Permits are required, nights up there are cold and thin at any time of year, and if you are prone to altitude trouble this is the single most likely place in Ladakh to feel it.

11. 11

    Nubra Valley - dunes, Bactrian camels and the Diskit Maitreya

    scenic off beaten path

    Over Khardung La and down the other side into a broad valley where the Shyok and Nubra rivers meet, green with apricot orchards and sea buckthorn and lower than Leh, which makes it a comfortable place to sleep. At Hunder there are proper sand dunes with double-humped Bactrian camels grazing on them, descendants of the caravan stock left behind when the Central Asian trade died. A colossal seated Maitreya on the ridge above Diskit faces down the Shyok towards Pakistan, above a monastery founded in the 14th century. Further out are the hot springs at Panamik and the Balti villages around Turtuk, which only came under Indian administration in 1971 and feel like another country because until then they were one.

12. 12

    Markha Valley - the classic Ladakh trek

    hiking adventure

    The best-known walking route in the region, usually done over six to eight days from Zingchen or Chilling, crossing the Ganda La and finishing over the Kongmaru La at around 5,260 m. It runs through a deep side valley behind the Stok range, past ruined forts and the villages of Skiu, Markha and Hankar, with river crossings that are knee-deep in the morning and thigh-deep by afternoon, and it ends on the high summer pasture at Nimaling under Kang Yatse. Homestays in the villages and parachute-tent tea stops mean you can walk it without a full camping caravan. Blue sheep and marmots are everywhere; the trailhead is inside a national park, so there are fees and rules.

13. 13

    The Chadar - walking the frozen Zanskar

    hiking adventure

    For a few weeks in the deep cold of mid-January and February the Zanskar river freezes hard enough to walk on, and the gorge that is impassable the rest of the year becomes a road. Zanskaris used it for generations to reach Leh in winter, carrying loads on sledges and sleeping in caves; it is now a commercial trek that draws people from across India, walking on ice between vertical rock walls with nights well below minus twenty. It is also genuinely dangerous and heavily regulated: registration, a medical check in Leh, compulsory acclimatisation days and a licensed guide are all part of it, ice conditions change from one day to the next, and warm winters have shortened the window. This is the one thing in Ladakh you never arrange casually on arrival.

14. 14

    Snow leopard tracking above the Indus

    nature wildlife adventure

    The national park south of Leh holds one of the densest snow leopard populations anywhere, and in the depth of winter the cats follow blue sheep and urial down into the valleys around Rumbak and Husing, which puts them within scope range of a village homestay. Trips run as long cold days with local spotters glassing the ridges and radioing each other when something moves, and you sit and wait. Nobody promises a sighting, though the odds here are better than anywhere else on earth, and the wolves, lammergeiers, golden eagles and herds of blue sheep are consolation. Village homestays and trained local guides mean the money stays in the valleys that live alongside the animal.

15. 15

    Ladakhi food - thukpa, skyu and butter tea

    food

    Local cooking is barley, wheat and root vegetables, built for cold and altitude. Skyu is thumb-pressed pasta discs stewed with turnip, carrot and potato; chutagi is its bow-tie cousin in soup; thukpa is the noodle broth everyone knows, and momos come steamed or fried at every hour. Khambir, a dense round local bread, comes with apricot jam at breakfast or with gur gur cha, the churned salt-and-butter tea that takes most visitors several attempts. Apricots turn up fresh, dried, as juice and as kernels, and sea buckthorn juice is the sour orange local answer to everything. Chhang, the home-brewed barley beer, is a village drink rather than a restaurant one. Alongside all this Changspa runs on bakeries and traveller cafes doing Israeli, Tibetan and Italian food to a standard that says a lot about who has been coming here since the seventies.

Getting to & around Leh

Know before you go