Almora

Almora is the cultural and spiritual heart of Kumaon, a historic crescent-shaped hill town perched at 1,638 metres on a ridge in the Almora district of Uttarakhand. Established as the capital of the Chand dynasty in 1563, Almora has been a centre of Kumaoni art, culture, music, and craftsmanship for over four centuries. Its famous Lal Bazaar — a kilometre-long ridge-top street lined with traditional wooden-fronted shops — is unlike any other in the Himalayas: selling hand-woven woollen shawls, copperware, brass artefacts, local sweets (bal mithai and singori), and spices that have been traded here for centuries.

Almora has a remarkable intellectual and spiritual heritage. Swami Vivekananda meditated here in 1890 before travelling to the West. Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, and dozens of other Western artists and thinkers came to Kasar Devi — a hillock 8km from Almora — in the 1960s and 70s, drawn by its unusual electromagnetic field and meditative atmosphere. The Kasar Devi temple and the Crank's Ridge area surrounding it remain a point of pilgrimage for spiritually inclined travellers. Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore also visited and was inspired by Almora's landscape.

The temples around Almora are extraordinary. Chitai Golu Devta temple is one of Uttarakhand's most unique — its walls and ceilings are plastered with tens of thousands of small paper 'arji' (petitions) written by devotees seeking justice from the deity. Jageshwar Dham, 35km from Almora, features 124 ancient stone temples dating from the 7th–12th centuries, set in a magnificent grove of ancient deodar cedars — one of the most atmospheric temple complexes in the Himalayas. Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary (33km) adds a natural dimension with its extraordinary Himalayan peak panorama and birdlife.