India’s high altitude border region, Ladakh, is best known for its extraordinary landscape where the bare rock of the Himalayas appears to thrust through flat expanses of desert to create a dazzling backdrop of peaks and crags set against an intensely blue sky. The rivers Indus and Zanskar meander through the valleys of central Ladakh but provide little relief for the parched earth.  Instead a complex system of irrigation channels traverse the desert, bringing water from the glaciers to feed oases where human settlement becomes possible.   The impression of an organic fusion between the land and these features reflects the technologies and aesthetics of Ladakh’s inhabitants. Come experience Ladakh.

Covering an area of nearly 82,000 square kilometres, nowhere else in India is so large a space so sparsely populated as Ladakh.  Living in extreme weather conditions where temperatures drop to minus fifty degrees centigrade in winter and rise to the heat of forty degrees in summer, Ladakh’s inhabitants have adapted to this harsh environment.  Yet, they live in harmony with nature that yields them a rich and fertile soil and multiple water sources.

Ladakh is bordered to the north and east by Tibet and in the west by Pakistan.  Its southern-most regions lead down into the plains of India via long established trade routes through Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir. Despite its harsh terrain and remoteness from urban centres, Ladakh has long been a location where people, commerce and cultures intermingled and it reflects influences from many other places in its culture, cuisine, dress, art and language.