Article by Mr Mir Altaf
A valley on the Line of Control has become one of India’s most compelling tourism stories. What it chooses to become over the next decade could shape how the country thinks about its frontiers.
The descent from Razdan Pass is where the journey to Gurez changes character. At nearly 11,700 feet the land falls away and the valley opens below: the Kishanganga winding through meadows, log houses gathered in clusters, Habba Khatoon peak standing guard over Dawar. Not long ago, most Indians knew the name Gurez only from defence reporting. Today Gurez appears on travel reels and on the itineraries of families from Kolkata, Pune and Chennai.
Three years ago, on World Tourism Day, Dawar was named a Gold winner in the Union Tourism Ministry’s Best Tourism Villages competition. A village a few kilometres from the LoC, snowbound for months and within range of shelling until 2021, had become a national model of rural tourism.
For decades, India’s borderlands were administered as the edge of the country, places to be defended and supplied. Policy now treats them as a first line of opportunity, where development and economic confidence are themselves instruments of national strength. Gurez shows what that shift can achieve, and it now faces the question every successful frontier destination must answer: what next?
A Corridor that Became a Frontier
Gurez was never truly remote. It became remote.
For centuries the valley lay on routes connecting Kashmir with Gilgit and Central Asia. Its people, the Dard-Shin, appear in Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, which records a king building a Buddhist vihara near the Dard country before the third century BCE. A long tradition associates Kanzalwan with the Fourth Buddhist Council under Kanishka, Dawar, an ancient seat of the Dards, was noted by Sir Aurel Stein for its watch tower commanding the valley. Historians debate some of these associations, but together they say something important: this was once a connected place.
Partition turned the corridor into a frontier. The LoC severed the old road to Gilgit and divided a community whose language, Shina, is still spoken on both sides. For seven decades, Gurez was defined by its strategic location, a single road over a snowbound pass and, in the worst years, shelling. The valley opened to domestic tourists only in 2007, and for years, few came.
A Frontier back in National Focus
Gurez’s transformation is part of a sustained national effort to bring border areas into the mainstream, one that gathered momentum in Jammu and Kashmir after 2019.
The Border Area Development Programme had long funded roads, schools and health centres in border blocks. What changed after 2019 was the scale of attention. The Vibrant Villages Programme embodied a new philosophy: a prosperous, confident civilian population is itself a pillar of border security. High-level visits and focused reviews kept the momentum on the ground.
The high point came in August 2025, when Gurez hosted its first-ever National Tribal Festival under the banner of Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat, organised by the Tribal Affairs Department with support from the Army and district administration. The Lieutenant Governor inaugurated it, the Chief Minister attended closing ceremony, and flagged off commercial rafting on the Kishanganga, and also Shina Gilgit 88.8 FM, a community radio station for Dard-Shina heritage, went on air.
What Changed on the Ground
Four conditions shifted at once.
The first was security. The February 2021 ceasefire ended routine shelling, and then the Army, and other security agencies together created a secure, enabling environment for tourism.
The second was the road. Before a destination can be marketed, someone has to make it reachable, and in Gurez that task has fallen above all to the Border Roads Organisation. In 2019 the Bandipora–Gurez road was punishing and the stretch into Tulail worse. Today a macadamised road runs to Chakwali, the last village near the LoC, and the BRO is completing a road beyond it towards Kaobal Gali. Grid power, mobile towers and data coverage followed, with benefits beyond tourism: this year, four students from Gurez cleared NEET, helped by online coaching that reliable connectivity made possible.
The third was visibility. Social media campaigns such as #GoGurez, travel creators and word of mouth carried the valley to millions of phones. Gurez had to become digitally visible before it could become commercially visible.
The fourth was a change in administrative imagination. From 2020, the question shifted from “how do we manage this sensitive area?” to “how do we open it without compromising its strategic and ecological character?” Those first four years were decisive, and they coincided with the tenure of Dr Owais Ahmad as Deputy Commissioner of Bandipora, under whom the district administration, Tourism Department and Army began working as one system. Camping sites opened, youth were trained in hospitality and guiding, and homestays were encouraged, with elected representatives, hoteliers and families as partners. Recognition followed: Outlook Traveller’s Best Offbeat Destination award in 2022, and Dawar’s national award a year later.
The Army: From Sentinel to Partner
No account of Gurez is complete without the Indian Army, which has earned the valley’s trust through medical camps, schools & winter evacuations, and has now become one of the most imaginative promoters of its culture and tourism.
The Log Hut Café in Dawar, opened in 2021, was a small idea with a large effect. It welcomed visitors, trained local youth in hospitality and showed that such a business could thrive where none had existed; local entrepreneurs followed. Tulail Café extended the idea, and the Balwan Café has carried it into the upper valley.
The Army’s most enduring gift may be Shinon Meeras, the Shina Cultural Centre, India’s first museum dedicated to the Dards. It told the community that its heritage is a national treasure, and told visitors that Gurez is a civilisation, not merely a landscape. This month a sound and laser show on the valley’s history and a Gurez Kitchen serving local cuisine were added, giving visitors a reason to stay another evening. In Bagtore, a stone’s throw from the LoC, the Army has revived polo, organised cricket for young women and supported a modern library with computers and Wi-Fi for local students. These are images of confidence unthinkable in the years of shelling.
The Numbers and the Multiplier
In 2019–20, Gurez received about 5,000 visitors and had barely two hotels. Official figures show 40,105 visitors in 2022 and 48,797 in 2023, rising to 1,11,613 in 2024 and 54,675 in 2025. By September this year, around two lakh tourists had visited, a forty-fold rise in seven years. Some fifty hotels and homestays now operate, and nearly a hundred local families pitch close to 500 tents in the meadows of Badwan and Wanpora, together able to host about 3000 visitors a night.
The economic change is larger still. By conservative estimates, tourism brought well under ₹1 crore into the valley in 2019–20. This year visitors spent an estimated ₹55–60 crore directly in Gurez, close to ₹100 crore once that money circulates through the local economy. For a valley of about 40,000 people, that is a transformation of household economics.
Almost every hotel, homestay and camp is locally owned, several by women. A mid-sized hotel can now net over ₹25 lakh in a good season, while camping families together earn over ₹5 crore, a five-tent family making close to ₹5 lakh in a few months. Restaurants, eateries and tea stalls have multiplied; new guest houses employ local carpenters, reviving traditional log construction. Young people who once left each winter now stay to invest at home, and in a border valley a thriving, rooted population is the strongest foundation of a secure frontier.
This July, women from self-help groups began selling local produce at the new Gurezi Bazaar in Dawar. Once a market on a trans-Himalayan route, Gurez is becoming a market linking mountain producers with Indian consumers.
The Limits of Success
The recent surge has also exposed the strain: waste, sewage reaching streams, rapid construction, pressure on the Kishanganga. The government has responded with compost and soakage pits, segregation sheds, door-to-door collection, a plastic waste unit under construction and a ban on entry of polythene in Gurez and also on any kind of dumping in the river. These steps mark the right transition, from promoting tourism to governing it.
Gurez 2036: A Vision
If the last five years were about opening Gurez, the next ten must be about shaping it. By 2036, Gurez should be India’s model frontier destination: a year-round valley where tourism is high in value and low in impact, owned largely by its people, rooted in Dard-Shina culture and planned within the limits of its land and river.
Dawar would be the gateway and cultural capital; Bagtore and Kanzalwan would offer heritage, border and agro-tourism. The flagship, however, should be Tulail. Stretching through Badugam, Sheikhpora, Angaikot and Chakwali, it is the valley Gurez once was: broad meadows, traditional villages and striking high country. It should be an adventure, eco and community-tourism destination, not a hotel town, offering graded treks to alpine lakes and passes, homestay and camping clusters in restored log houses and meadows, farm stays built on kala zeera and rajma, angling, dark-sky tourism and a community-run Shina cultural sub-centre at Sheikhpora. Developed well, it can become a model Himalayan destination.
Tulail is also the key to new corridors: planned links from Barnayee to Kangan and from Angaikot towards Sonamarg, and the road through Kaobal Gali to Drass. These could turn Gurez from a cul-de-sac into a hub on a Srinagar–Gurez–Drass–Sonamarg circuit, though in fragile terrain some are better kept as managed trekking routes than motor roads. The Kaobal Gali–Drass link would reconnect the Shina-speaking communities of Gurez and Drass, long separated by mountains, and give the country a valuable lateral link between two frontier sectors, strengthening both civilian life and defence preparedness. The Razdan tunnel, now under active consideration, could make Gurez a year-round destination, which is why winter planning must start now.
A vision is only as good as the rules that protect it. Gurez will need carrying capacities for fragile sites, managed through timed online permits; a building code that keeps construction low-rise, in timber and away from the river; universal registration and safety certification of homestays, camps and adventure operators; priority for residents, cooperatives and SHGs in the spirit of vocal for local; a plastic-free Tulail; and a formal voice for residents through panchayats and a tourism development authority.
In keeping with this year’s World Tourism Day theme on digital technology and AI, Gurez could become a pilot for the intelligent frontier. AI could record the oral histories and songs of Shina-speaking elders, build digital dictionaries for a language with few written resources and create 3D archives of artefacts and log-house architecture, with the community owning its stories. It could also forecast arrivals, issue road alerts on Razdan and steer visitors towards Tulail’s homestays, helping the valley decide not how many visitors it can attract, but how many, when, where and on whose terms.
The Road Back
The road over Razdan is, in a sense, the whole story. It once carried traders towards Gilgit, then became a strategic supply line closed for months each year. Today it is a tourism road reaching deep into Tulail. It may yet become an all-weather lifeline and, through Kaobal Gali, a strategic road back to Drass.
Gurez’s lesson for India’s borderlands is that development works best as a convergence of security, roads, administration, the Army and the community, measured by the multiplier rather than the headcount. The valley has shown that a frontier can become a flourishing destination. The harder question is whether a place can become more accessible without becoming less itself. The answer will lie with the women at the Gurezi Bazaar, the young guides of Tulail and the families along the Kishanganga- whether they feel the people arriving at their door are making their valley stronger.
