Lolab Valley
"Kupwara isn't on anyone's itinerary. Neither, apparently, is the prettiest valley I found in Kashmir."
A forested valley near Kupwara whose name translates, roughly, to something like a valley of love — and nobody I met disagreed with the description.
I’ll admit I went to Lolab Valley on a rumour, half-remembered from a conversation with a houseboat owner in Srinagar who mentioned, almost in passing, that the forests near Kupwara were the greenest he’d ever seen and that almost no foreign visitors bothered to make the drive. Kupwara sits close to the Line of Control and doesn’t carry the tourism infrastructure of the central valley, which perhaps explains why Lolab, one of Kashmir’s loveliest valleys by any reasonable measure, barely registers on most travel itineraries.
The valley earns its reputation honestly. Dense forests of deodar, pine, and walnut climb the slopes on either side, thick enough in places that the light comes through in broken shafts even at midday, and streams run down through them into a floor of meadows and rice paddies that stays a startling, saturated green through most of the growing season. I stopped the car more times than I can count just to look at a particular fold of the hillside, a particular stream crossing, a particular stand of trees — Lolab doesn’t have one signature view so much as an accumulation of small, quiet ones, each worth its own moment.
I stopped for tea in the small town of Sogam, where an orchardist told me, with visible pride, that Lolab’s apples and walnuts were among the finest in the valley, though the difficulty of transport out of the region meant much of the harvest never reached markets beyond Kupwara district. He walked me through part of his orchard afterward, pointing out walnut trees he said his grandfather had planted, and gave me a handful of shelled walnuts to eat on the drive back — sweeter and less bitter than any I’d had elsewhere in Kashmir, though I have no way to know if that was true or just the effect of good company and a beautiful afternoon.
When to go: May through September, when the meadows and orchards are at their greenest. Roads and permissions can shift given the valley’s proximity to the border, so check current access conditions with a local operator before setting out.