Ura Valley and the Ura Yakchoe

Ura is the highest and most eastern of Bumthang’s four valleys — 3,090 m, 48 km east of Jakar, over a pass — and one of the largest clustered villages in Bhutan. Its Yakchoe is a five-day spring festival: 28 April – 2 May 2026, 18–22 April 2027. Entry is included in your tour.

How far it actually is

48 kilometres, east, over a pass, ending at 3,090 metres.

That is the useful figure, and it is the one we lead with because the drive is the thing that decides whether Ura fits your trip. We do not publish a drive time: nobody official does, and mountain kilometres are not road kilometres. Ask us and we will tell you what it takes with the road as it is that week.

Ura is a day out of Jakar, not a morning. Plan it as one.

What the village is like

A cluster of stone houses packed tight around a temple, with the fields worked in common outside — which is unusual in Bhutan, where farmhouses are usually scattered across their own land. It is one of the largest clustered villages in the country and it reads as a single settlement rather than a valley of farms.

Above it: spruce, pine, juniper, larch, bamboo and rhododendron. In autumn the open ground turns the colour of dry grass and the whole valley looks, as our own description has said for years, like a prairie in the fall. That description is worth keeping.

At 3,090 m it is 600 metres higher than Jakar and it gets nearly twice the rainfall — around 1,350 mm a year against Jakar’s 760. It is colder than anywhere else you will stop in Bumthang and you will want a layer more than you packed.

The Yakchoe

Five days, in April or early May. 28 April – 2 May 2026; 18–22 April 2027 — lunar dates that shift, so check the Bhutan festival calendar before you plan around them.

The festival centres on a sacred relic kept in the village temple and brought out in procession — that is what the villagers themselves come for, and the mask dances happen around it. There are folk dances too, and oral storytelling, which is rarer at Bhutanese festivals than the mask dances and is genuinely part of the programme here.

“Yakchoe” is understood in the valley to refer to the yak — the animal to which the people of Ura made offerings before Buddhism reached them. That reading is local and we have carried it for years; we have found nothing that contradicts it and nothing that confirms it either, which is worth saying plainly.

The Yakchoe is a village festival that welcomes outsiders rather than a festival staged for them. Dress properly — long sleeves, no hats — and expect to sit on the ground.

When to go, and how it fits your trip

April or early May for the Yakchoe. September or October for the valley itself, when the light is best and the drive is comfortable.

Ura is the longest day trip in Bumthang and the one most itineraries drop first. It is also the only one that shows you what upland Bhutan looks like above three thousand metres, which the other three valleys do not. See things to do in Bumthang to weigh it against the Choekor, Tang and Chumey days.