Kashmir Valley & Dal Lake

About this pack

A 6-day premium trip to Srinagar, India, taking in Dal Lake shikaras, Shalimar Bagh gardens, Gulmarg gondola and Betaab Valley.

Inside the Kashmir Valley & Dal Lake trip

Kashmir Valley & Dal Lake opens on Dal Lake, the freshwater lake in Srinagar known as the "Lake of Flowers" and long considered the jewel of the Kashmir Valley. Covering some 18 square kilometres and fringed by a 15.5-kilometre shoreline of Mughal-era gardens, houseboats and hotels, the lake is divided by causeways into four connected basins — Gagribal, Lokut Dal, Bod Dal and Nigeen — and its floating gardens, known locally as "Raad," bloom with lotus flowers each July and August. Ancient Sanskrit texts refer to the lake as Mahasarit, or "great lake," and through the Mughal period the emperors developed its shores as a summer retreat, building the pleasure gardens that still line its edges and give the lake its enduring association with the shikara boats that ferry visitors across its water. The lake also sustains a working economy of its own: houseboat families and vegetable growers who farm the floating gardens have long relied on Dal for fishing and water-plant harvesting alongside tourism, and in winter, temperatures around the lake can fall to around -11 degrees Celsius, freezing sections of its surface.

Chief among those gardens is Shalimar Bagh, built on the northeastern shore of Dal Lake in 1619 by the Mughal emperor Jahangir and regarded as the high point of Mughal garden design, later extended by Shah Jahan's governor Zafar Khan in 1630. Structured around a central water channel, the Shah Nahar, that runs axially through three terraces lined with chinar trees and fountains, the garden was Jahangir's imperial summer residence and Royal Court, reached from Delhi by crossing the passes of the Pir Panjal range on elephant back; its innermost terrace, the Zenana garden, once held a black marble pavilion built by Shah Jahan for the women of the royal household, ringed by a fountain pool fed from a higher terrace. The garden was extended further in 1630 under Shah Jahan and, over the following two centuries, was maintained and adapted by later rulers of Kashmir, including the Sikh governors after 1819, who used its marble pavilion to receive European visitors, before it passed into the care of the Dogra maharajas and was eventually opened to the public as the garden seen today.

The route climbs from the valley floor to Gulmarg, a hill station in the Pir Panjal Range at 2,650 metres whose name, meaning "meadow of flowers," was given by the 16th-century Kashmiri ruler Yousuf Shah Chak in place of its older name, Gaurimarg. Jahangir himself is said to have collected wildflower specimens here for his gardens during the Mughal period, and in the 19th century British civil servants developed Gulmarg as a summer retreat, laying out golf courses and, in 1927, founding a ski club that still holds annual events; the meadows below Apharwat Peak, which rises to 4,267 metres, remain snow-covered through winter and bloom with daisies and buttercups each spring. The town itself sits within the Gulmarg Wildlife Sanctuary in the Pir Panjal Range of the Western Himalayas, its glacial soils shaped by moraines and lake deposits left behind from the Pleistocene epoch, and its permanent population remains small, made up largely of families connected to the seasonal tourism trade that the ski club and its winter sports events first established a century ago.

The trip closes at Betaab Valley, a sub-valley of the wider Kashmir Valley near Pahalgam, set between the Pir Panjal and Zanskar ranges of the Himalayas and known locally as Hagan Valley before it was renamed after the 1983 Bollywood film "Betaab," shot on location here. Ringed by snow-capped peaks and dense forest, the valley today serves as a popular campsite and a base for further trekking toward the mountains beyond, its clear glacial stream running down from the surrounding slopes — a quiet, meadow-lined close to a route that has already carried the traveller across a lake of floating gardens, an imperial Mughal retreat, and a colonial-era hill station turned ski resort.

• Dal Lake — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Gulmarg — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Betaab Valley — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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