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Kumaon Cultural Atlas

Temples, forts, peaks, forests, birds, the region's registered GI products and visitor numbers, and places to stay along road circuits you can plan yourself, for Nainital, Almora, Bageshwar, Champawat, Pithoragarh and Udham Singh Nagar.

Shaded relief of Kumaon, from the terai plains to the Panchachuli and Nanda Kot

Move over the map for elevation and district. Select a marker for details.

Plan a circuit

start from

Most driving in a day h

Each stop is a night's base. Add any marker from the map with its Add to trip button. Drive times come from OpenStreetMap's road network at rough hill-road speeds; they leave out breaks, traffic and the monsoon landslides that close roads most years from July to September.

Places to stay

District KMVN rest houses only On a good road, with food nearby

Sites

Kind District

From OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, merged where they name the same place. Ranked by how widely each is written about: the number of Wikipedia language editions, with an English article and a photo counting extra. Small village shrines are on the map but rarely make the top of this list.

Birds

Species and hotspots from eBird (Cornell Lab of Ornithology), counting full species only. Hotspots named for a private home are left off. The map's bird-record layer is GBIF's count of all bird occurrence records, which mostly come from eBird too: it shows where people watch birds as much as where birds are.

Forest and land cover

ESA WorldCover 2021 (10 m, read here at about 100 m), share of each district's area. Forest on this map is WorldCover's tree cover; it doesn't separate oak, pine and sal, or natural forest from plantation. Protected-area outlines are OpenStreetMap's.

GI products

Visitors by destination

Yearly visitor counts published by the Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board, 2021–2025. 2021 was a Covid year. Each row's bars are scaled to its own busiest year, to show its trend; compare places by the numbers. Counts are the board's own, from hotel and site registers; they aren't comparable to census-style surveys.