Mongar Town

Mongar town sits on the side of a hill at about 1,600 m, halfway along the eastern highway, and most people who come here are stopping for a night between Bumthang and Trashigang. Half an hour to forty-five minutes covers the town on foot; the dzong above it is a separate stop.

What is different about it?

It is built up a hillside, not along a valley floor. That sounds like a small thing until you have spent a fortnight in Paro, Thimphu and Punakha, all of which are laid out flat beside a river. Mongar is stacked. Streets run across the slope and everything is above or below something else, which gives it a completely different feel from anywhere in the west — and means there is no flat walk in it.

How big is it, really?

4,452 people at the 2017 census.

That makes it the third-largest town in eastern Bhutan, after Samdrup Jongkhar on the Indian border and Nganglam in Pemagatshel. We say so plainly because our own page used to call it the largest, which it is not and has not been.

The more interesting number is the split. On the district’s own 2022 projection, roughly ten thousand of Mongar’s people live in towns and twenty-six thousand do not — and the ten thousand is six towns put together, not this one. Mongar is a district of villages with an administrative centre attached, and the drive in from any direction makes that obvious.

Why does a town this size matter?

Because of the hospital.

The Eastern Regional Referral Hospital is here, and it serves the six eastern dzongkhags and Bumthang — a catchment spread over the hardest terrain in the country. When something is serious in eastern Bhutan, it comes to Mongar. That, far more than its population, is why the town is here and why it keeps growing slowly while the district’s own population is projected to fall.

Wikipedia calls Mongar the fastest-developing district in eastern Bhutan, and in that sense — roads, power, the hospital, the Kurichhu plant down at Gyalpozhing — it is a fair description of what the last thirty years have done here.

What is there to see?

Honestly, not a great deal, and the honest answer is better than a list.

Mongar Dzong is the reason to stop, a few minutes above the centre. Beyond it — what a half-hour in the town is actually worth doing with is a question for your guide, not for this page. Nothing published describes the street, and we would rather have a guide who was here last month tell you than furnish it from a distance.

Yagang Lhakhang stands about two kilometres out, a sixteenth-century temple founded by Sangdag, the youngest son of Pema Lingpa, which keeps masks, armour, old weapons and wooden printing blocks, and holds its own three-day festival in the fifth lunar month. There is also a nunnery, opened in 2016, on the edge of town. Ask us whether either is on your day — neither is a fixture of the usual eastern itinerary.

Where it sits

Mongar is the hinge of the eastern drive: about seven hours from Bumthang over Thrumshing La, about four hours from Trashigang over Kori La, and two hours from Lhuentse. Almost every eastern itinerary sleeps here at least once, whichever way it is going.

See things to do in Mongar for the rest of the district.