Sixteen Newar families and a lake
In the 17th century Pokhara was farmland under the kingdom of Kaski, one of the twenty-four small hill states, whose rulers kept their fort at Kaskikot on the ridge to the west. The Parajuli Brahmin families who looked after Bindhyabasini temple were among the first settlers in the valley floor. In the 1770s the last king of Kaski invited sixteen Newar trading families from Bhaktapur to build a proper market, and they settled around Bindhyabasini, Nalakomukh and Bhairab Tole, the core of today's old bazaar.
The market sat on two trade routes: from Kathmandu west to Jumla, and from India north to Tibet through the Kali Gandaki gorge. Mule trains brought salt and wool down and carried grain and cloth up. In 1786 the expanding Gorkha state absorbed Kaski. Pokhara stayed a foot-and-mule town for nearly two more centuries: until the Siddhartha Highway reached it in 1968, the only way in was to walk or fly onto a grass strip. Porters and mules carried everything else, from kerosene to roofing tin.
After 1959 Tibetan refugees settled in four camps around the city, Tashi Palkhel, Tashi Ling, Paljorling and Jampaling, which are now neighbourhoods with their own monasteries. Gurkha families retired to Pokhara on army pensions. Trekkers arrived with the road, and Lakeside grew from paddy fields. Today Pokhara is a metropolitan city of about 600,000 people, declared Nepal's tourism capital in 2024, with an international airport opened on 1 January 2023. Gurung, Magar and Khas villages still cover the surrounding hills, and many of their families now keep a second home in the city.
