Chimi Lhakhang (the Fertility Temple)

Chimi Lhakhang is a small hilltop temple below Lobesa in Punakha, reached by a 20-minute walk through working rice fields. It’s known as Bhutan’s fertility temple, and the blessing is given with a wooden phallus carried from Tibet by Drukpa Kunley, the Divine Madman. Allow about 1.5 hours.

The walk in

You leave the road at Sopsokha and set off on a farm track that runs out across the paddies and up onto the hillock the temple stands on. It’s about 20 minutes each way, flat for most of it with a short climb at the end.

This is the best part, and it catches people by surprise. You’re walking between rice terraces worked by hand, with the valley opening out on both sides — in autumn you go in past the harvest, in summer through water and green. The temple appears above you long before you reach it.

The surface is earth, so it’s dusty in the dry months and genuinely muddy after rain, with the last stretch slippery in the monsoon. Wear shoes you don’t mind about. There’s no vehicle access and no step-free route.

The village painted with phalluses

Sopsokha is the thing everyone photographs on the way through. The houses carry large painted phalluses on their outer walls, and the shops sell carved wooden ones in every size.

It’s worth knowing what you’re looking at. The motif is protective, not comic — it wards off ill will and gossip — and it traces back to Drukpa Kunley, who taught through obscenity, drunkenness and deliberate outrage, puncturing the piety of the monasteries of his day. Bhutan has loved him for it for five centuries. Your guide will tell you the stories, some of which are not printable.

What happens at the temple

Inside, a resident lama gives the blessing: the temple’s wooden phallus, said to have been brought from Tibet by Kunley himself and decorated in silver, is kept here, and the blessing is given with a smaller one about 25 cm long, touched to the crown of your head.

Women hoping to conceive then draw a bamboo slip from the altar, each inscribed with a boy’s or a girl’s name — the name for the child they hope to have. Couples come from across Bhutan and, increasingly, from abroad.

This is a living temple, not a curiosity. The people beside you at the altar are often there for something that matters a great deal to them, and guests who arrive expecting a photo opportunity tend to leave having had a rather different morning. Dress covers shoulders and knees, shoes come off inside, and photography stops at the door.

When to go, and how it fits your day

October to April is the comfortable window, with February–March and October–November the pick of it — the fields are at their best either side of the monsoon, and the walk is dry underfoot.

Chimi Lhakhang sits about 10 km down the valley from Punakha, near the Lobesa junction, which makes it the natural pair to Punakha Dzong: dzong in the morning, temple and the walk in the afternoon, or the reverse if you’d rather have the paddies in low light. Many itineraries take it on the way in from Thimphu, since the road passes the turning.

The published entry fee is Nu 500, set by the Department of Tourism in March 2023, and it is included in your tour — so there is nothing to pay at the temple.

See things to do in Punakha for how it compares with the rest of the valley, and the Bhutan 7-day itinerary for where a Punakha day lands in a first trip.

A little history

The temple was built in 1499 by Ngawang Chogyal, the 14th abbot of Ralung Monastery. Drukpa Kunley (1455–1529) had already blessed the ground and built a chorten on it — the story goes that he subdued a demoness at Dochu La with what the texts call his magic thunderbolt of wisdom, and trapped her in a rock beside it. She is said to have taken the form of a dog, and the temple’s name traces back to that episode, though Dzongkha speakers will give you more than one translation.