Sangchen Choekor Shedra

Sangchen Choekor is a shedra — a Buddhist college — on the ridge about 12 km north-west of Paro town, up a rough unsealed road. It is the lit building you can see from the valley floor after dark. Allow 1.5–2 hours including the drive; entry is included in your tour. Ask us before you plan it in.

What it is

A working college, not a monument. Monks study here for six years, and graduates move on to Tango Monastery above Thimphu — one of the few genuine threads running between two districts’ worth of sights on this site, and worth knowing if you are doing both valleys.

A shedra is where the formal study happens: philosophy, logic, debate and scripture, as opposed to the ritual practice of a dratshang. It is a different atmosphere from a temple visit and a quieter one, and what you are being shown is an institution rather than an object.

Getting there, and what to expect

The road is the hard part. Twelve kilometres of rough unsealed track up the hillside; the site itself is level once you are on it. Allow an hour and a half to two hours all in, most of which is the drive.

What waits at the top is the view. The ridge looks straight back down the Paro valley, and on a clear day it is one of the best vantage points in the district that does not require walking.

Ask before you photograph. These are students, most of them young, and being visited is not the same as being on display — the same rule we apply at Dechen Phodrang in Thimphu.

Before you go

Check with us. Nobody publishes visiting arrangements for this shedra, and nobody publishes its term dates either, so we do not know from a desk whether it is full of students or empty for the holidays — and a 12 km rough road is a lot to drive for a locked gate.

Your guide finds out. That is the whole answer, and it is a better one than a schedule we would be inventing.

See things to do in Paro for how everything in the valley compares.

What we don’t publish about it

Its history, mostly. The founding date, the founder’s name, its role as a seat of the Sungtrul lineage and its re-establishment as a college in the 1990s are all repeated across the web in identical wording, and none of it traces to a Bhutanese, monastic or government source we could check.

So this page tells you what the building is doing now, which is verifiable and is what you would see. If our guides can put a date and a name to the rest, it goes on with a source behind it.