Hunza Valley

ValleysGilgit-Baltistan,Pakistan

A green valley of apricot orchards on Pakistan's Karakoram Highway, under a wall of ice rising to Rakaposhi, with a 700-year-old fort above the terraces.

September·Peaking now

Jul–Sep

High summer opens everything: all the passes, the Khunjerab border road and the glacier treks, with the apricot harvest in July and August. Days are warm, often into the 20s°C, though the edge of the monsoon in August and September can haze the peaks by midday.

Year-round Rakaposhi's near-vertical ice wall, the Karakoram giants around it, Attabad Lake's turquoise and the old Baltit and Altit forts stand over the valley every day of the year, reached by the Karakoram Highway to Karimabad.

Hunza is a valley in the Karakoram of northern Pakistan, on the Karakoram Highway between Gilgit and the Chinese border, where green terraces of apricot and cherry orchards climb the slopes under a wall of ice rising to Rakaposhi, 7,788 metres, and two forts, one 700 years old, stand above the villages. The valley's capital is Karimabad, and Baltit Fort is its crown, a mud, stone and timber fort built by the Mirs of Hunza on a moraine above the terraces, reshaped in a Tibetan style six centuries ago by craftsmen a princess of Baltistan brought with her marriage; the tour starts in the storerooms cut into the base, where wheat and maize were kept, and works up past the guardroom to a windowless room with a pit in the floor for the Mir's gold and out onto a roof above the valley. Altit Fort, on a rock spur above the river, is the older of the two and the first seat of the Mirs, its tower hanging over a drop to the water. The valley is famous for its light and its trees. Each spring the terraced orchards fill with pink and white blossom beneath the snow wall of Rakaposhi, and in autumn, from mid-October, the poplars and mulberries turn gold and crimson as fresh snow settles on the peaks around; a jeep track climbs to Eagle's Nest at Duikar, above Karimabad, for a sunrise that lights Rakaposhi, Ultar and Ladyfinger one by one. Two kilometres below Karimabad stands Ganish, the oldest settlement in Hunza, a walled square with a stone water tank and carved wooden mosques belonging to its clans. The highway itself is the reason the valley is reachable, threading the gorge along the old Silk Road line past stone-walled villages and beneath the ice face of Rakaposhi toward the Khunjerab Pass. The valley's mother tongue, Burushaski, is a language isolate, matched to no other language on Earth after more than a century of study. Hunza is a green valley under a white wall, and its people speak a language that belongs only to them.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The valley's single road can close at any time — rockfall and snow still shut sections of the Karakoram Highway, the one overland link in, so keep any schedule loose rather than tight.
Two fortnights carry the year — apricot blossom reaches central Hunza in early April and Passu a fortnight later, while the poplars go gold from mid-October. The bloom moves up the valley.
Dress modestly and ask before photographing people — Hunza is welcoming but largely Ismaili and conservative, so covered shoulders and knees, and a quick word before portraits, are appreciated.

Things to do

1
Explore Baltit Fort
The tour starts in the storerooms cut into the base, where wheat and maize were kept, and works up past the guardroom to a windowless room with a pit in the floor for the Mir's gold. Above it is the durbar, with a carved wooden canopy over the seat where the Mirs heard their subjects, and separate winter and summer bedrooms — one built round a hearth, the other walled with glass panes. The roof terrace is open on every side, over the flat roofs of the old town below.
2
Drive the Karakoram Highway
Follow the KKH as it threads the gorge along the old Silk Road line, past stone-walled villages and beneath the ice face of Rakaposhi, toward the Chinese border. Where the road hangs above the Hunza River you can stop and watch it wind below, pale turquoise with glacier melt, through walls of bare rock and, higher up, snow.
3
Walk down to Ganish and its clan mosques
Two kilometres below Karimabad, right on the highway, stands the oldest settlement in Hunza — a walled square with a stone water tank beside it. Eight mosques stand around it, one for each clan, along with three of the original fourteen watchtowers; four of the mosques were pulled back from collapse by the villagers and won a UNESCO conservation award in 2002. Ganish is also the valley's Twelver Shia pocket, in a Hunza that is otherwise almost entirely Ismaili.
4
Sunrise at Eagle's Nest
The jeep track up to Duikar is unsurfaced and steep, eight to ten kilometres of switchbacks that take half an hour in the dark, or about two and a half hours on foot. You end up roughly 350 metres above Karimabad on a bare ridge, high enough to see up and down the valley at once. The sun reaches the summits long before it reaches the town, so you watch Rakaposhi, Diran and Ultar burn while Karimabad is still in shadow.
5
Climb the tower at Altit Fort
Altit is the older of Hunza's two forts and the first seat of the Mirs, built on a rock spur above the river some three centuries before Baltit. Its Shikari watchtower, dated to about 1100, is the oldest standing building in Gilgit-Baltistan. Below the walls the Mirs' terraced garden has been replanted and the lanes of the old village were rebuilt with it, so the walk in from the road is part of the fort.

Watch

Nearby

17 km