Kalasha Valleys

Experiences / Cultural Heritage

Travel by interest

Cultural Heritage

A guide-led way into Pakistan's living culture, from craft towns and museums to the Kalash valleys' indigenous traditions.

Atlas Guide

Where to Go

Craft towns, living traditions, and indigenous culture

Living Craft

Guide section

Craft and Folklore

Meet the cultural texture of Pakistan through textiles, pottery, woodwork, music, and storytelling.

Ajrak craft Hala pottery Chiniot woodwork Lok Virsa

UNESCO Tentative

Guide section

Living Indigenous Cultures

The Bumburet, Rumbur, and Birir valleys house the Kalash, preserving animist traditions, wood-carved community assembly halls (Jeshtak-Han), and the sacred ancestral lake of Bahuk at 4,000m beneath Tirich Mir.

Kalasha Valleys Kalasha Dur Museum Bumburet Rumbur Birir

Browse every place

22 Places

22 of 22 field guides

Sindh

City Museum / Tajjar Building, Larkana

A brick building of 1832 in Larkana's Jinnah Bagh, later a library and now the city museum.

Punjab

Dyal Singh Trust Library

The Dyal Singh Trust Library in Lahore: a public library founded under the will of the philanthropist Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia (1849–1898).

Sindh

Empress Market

Karachi's great Victorian Gothic market hall in Saddar, its limestone arcades and clock tower still anchoring one of the city's busiest quarters.

Gilgit-Baltistan

Ganish Village

The oldest settlement on the Silk Road in Hunza, at least 1,000 years old, with watchtowers, four centuries-old mosques, and a UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award for its conservation.

Islamabad Capital Territory

Golra Sharif Railway Museum

The Pakistan Railways Heritage Museum at Golra Sharif station, Islamabad: 150 years of railway relics in a 19th-century junction station.

Punjab

Harappa Museum

The Harappa Museum at the Indus city of Harappa, 17 km west of Sahiwal: founded in 1926, in its present building since 1967.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Kalasha Valleys Cultural Landscape

Three Hindu Kush valleys, Bumburet, Rumbur, and Birir, home to the Kalasha people, their festivals, and a UNESCO tentative cultural landscape.

Balochistan

Karez System Cultural Landscape

A centuries-old underground irrigation network across Balochistan's arid plains, gently sloped tunnels carrying mountain groundwater to desert villages without a single pump.

Sindh

Khaliq Dina Hall & Library

Karachi's 1906 public hall and library, where Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar was tried for sedition in 1921.

Punjab

Lahore Museum

Pakistan's largest museum, opened in its Indo-Saracenic building on The Mall in 1894, holding some 60,000 artefacts across Gandhara Buddhist sculpture, Mughal miniatures, and the Sikh gallery, including the celebrated Fasting Buddha.

Islamabad Capital Territory

Lok Virsa Heritage Museum

Pakistan's national folk museum, a rich collection of crafts, textiles, musical instruments, and living-culture exhibitions representing every province and region.

Sindh

Mohen jo Daro Museum

The site museum at Mohenjo-daro, showing finds from the Indus city beside the ruins.

Sindh

Nagarparkar Cultural Landscape

A desert cultural landscape at Sindh's far southeastern edge, ringed by the granite Karoonjhar Hills, with centuries-old Jain temples and a distinct Sindhi-Rajasthani heritage found nowhere else in Pakistan.

Islamabad Capital Territory

National Art Gallery

Pakistan's first national art gallery, a brick cube opposite Parliament in Islamabad, opened 2007.

Sindh

Pakistan Air Force Museum, Karachi

The PAF Museum at Faisal Base, Karachi: Pakistan's only military aviation museum, with more than 50 aircraft, radars and missiles.

Sindh

Pakistan Maritime Museum, Karachi

The Pakistan Maritime Museum in a 28-acre park in Karachi, with the submarine PNS Hangor, a minesweeper and a Breguet Atlantic aircraft.

Islamabad Capital Territory

Pakistan Museum of Natural History

Islamabad's natural history museum, with 1.6 million specimens, fossils, gems and a whale skeleton.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Peshawar Museum

A landmark museum established in the early twentieth century, with a major collection of Gandharan sculpture and regional archaeology.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Qissa Khwani Bazaar, Peshawar

The 'Bazaar of Storytellers' in Peshawar's old city, a living caravanserai of spice merchants, copper smiths, chai kiosks, and some of the finest Pashtun frontier cooking in Pakistan.

Islamabad Capital Territory

Saidpur Village

A 500-year-old Mughal village tucked into the Margalla Hills, today a heritage precinct of restored havelis, galleries, craft shops, and one of Islamabad's best-loved eating streets.