Patan

Patan is fifteen minutes from Kathmandu and about a third as loud. It is the oldest of the three valley cities, the Buddhist one, and the one where things are still made (statues, singing bowls, thangkas, silver) by families who have been casting bronze in the same courtyards for a very long time.

If you have one day in the valley beyond Kathmandu, most people should spend it here rather than on a viewpoint.

The Durbar Square

Smaller than Kathmandu’s and denser: the temples are packed along one side of the square facing the royal palace, which is the concentration that makes every photograph of Patan look like that.

Krishna Mandir is the one to stand in front of. Built in 1637 entirely from stone at a time when everything else in the valley was brick and timber, in a north Indian shikhara style rather than the local pagoda, with twenty-one gilded pinnacles and friezes of the Mahabharata and Ramayana carved around the lower storeys. It came through 2015 essentially intact while brick temples either side of it fell.

The Patan Museum, in the restored palace, is the best museum in the country and it is not close. It explains what you are looking at everywhere else in Nepal, how a bronze is cast by lost wax, what the hand positions mean, why the same deity appears in five forms. Two hours here at the start of a Nepal trip repays itself for the rest of the trip. It is included in the square ticket.

Beyond the square

The Golden Temple, Hiranya Varna Mahavihar, is a three-storey Buddhist monastery courtyard a few minutes north, gilded, small and still in daily use. A young boy serves as its caretaker for thirty days at a time. Leave leather at the door.

Mahaboudha is a shikhara covered in terracotta tiles, each carrying an image of the Buddha, which is where “temple of a thousand buddhas” comes from. It is hidden down an alley and you will need to ask.

Kumbeshwar, five storeys, is one of only two five-tiered temples in the valley and the other is the Nyatapola in Bhaktapur.

The bahals are the point of walking here. Patan has more than a hundred of these Buddhist courtyard monasteries, most of them unmarked, reached through a low doorway off a lane. Inside there is usually a stupa, a shrine and washing lines. They are residential. Go in quietly, look, and leave.

The metalworking

Patan produces most of Nepal’s religious bronze and much of Tibet’s. The workshops are concentrated around Oku Bahal in the south of the old town, and several will let you watch the wax models being made and the moulds fired.

If you are buying, buy in the workshop district rather than in Thamel, ask what the piece is and who it is of, and expect to be told. Weight, not shine, is what separates a cast bronze from a plated one.

Where to eat and stay

There are several restored Newar houses run as small hotels around the square, and they are the reason to consider basing yourself here instead of Thamel: you get the same access to Kathmandu with far less noise, and the square outside your door at six in the morning.

Patan also has the valley’s most interesting modern Nepali cooking, in a handful of places doing Newar food properly rather than as a set menu.

Practical things

• Ride apps work well here and cost roughly a third of what a tourist taxi will quote. There are no meters.
• The ticket covers the square and the museum for one day and can be extended at the office for the length of your visa, as in Bhaktapur.
• Traffic across the Bagmati bridges is the worst part of the day. Go early or go late.
• Rato Machhindranath, if you are here for it, runs for weeks in April and May and ends with a chariot up to thirty metres tall being hauled through streets it barely fits down. It is not staged for anyone.