Kathmandu — Capital of Nepal

Kathmandu takes its name, by most accounts, from the Kasthamandap, a large wooden pavilion said to have been built entirely from the timber of a single tree, standing in the heart of what is now the city's Durbar Square since at least the 12th century and serving historically as a rest house and gathering place along trade routes between India and Tibet.

For centuries before Nepal existed as a unified state, the Kathmandu Valley was home to a highly developed Newar civilization split among three rival city-kingdoms — Kathmandu, Patan (Lalitpur), and Bhaktapur — each ruled by its own branch of the Malla dynasty and each competing to build ever more elaborate palace squares, temples, and public architecture, a rivalry that left the valley with an unusually dense concentration of historic monuments for its size.

That three-way rivalry ended in 1768–69, when Prithvi Narayan Shah, king of the small hill principality of Gorkha, conquered all three Malla kingdoms in a campaign traditionally treated as the founding act of the unified Kingdom of Nepal. Kathmandu, the largest and most strategically located of the three valley cities, became the capital of the new unified kingdom and has remained the national capital continuously since, through the Shah monarchy, the century of Rana family rule as hereditary prime ministers, and the modern republic established in 2008.

The valley's dense architectural heritage — including Kathmandu Durbar Square, the Swayambhunath and Boudhanath Buddhist stupas, and the Hindu temple complex of Pashupatinath — earned collective UNESCO World Heritage status in 1979, recognition that also made the scale of damage from the 25 April 2015 earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 people nationwide and severely damaged or destroyed numerous historic structures in the capital, a significant international heritage loss as well as a humanitarian one.

Modern Kathmandu functions as Nepal's political, economic, and cultural hub, home to the federal parliament, virtually all national ministries, and Tribhuvan International Airport, the country's only international gateway — a degree of centralization common among capitals whose surrounding country is otherwise dominated by rugged, sparsely connected mountain terrain that makes concentrating national institutions in one accessible valley city a practical necessity as much as a historical inheritance.

Kathmandu also serves as the effective logistical gateway for the country's mountaineering and trekking industry, since virtually all expeditions bound for Everest and Nepal's other major Himalayan peaks pass through the capital's airport and its cluster of trekking agencies and equipment shops before continuing on to the mountains — making the capital, somewhat counterintuitively for a lowland-elevation city compared to its famous peaks, the practical starting point for nearly all high-altitude tourism in the country.

The Kumari Ghar, a traditional building on Durbar Square, houses the Kumari, a young girl selected through a centuries-old tradition to be worshipped as a living goddess until she reaches puberty, at which point a new Kumari is chosen; the practice, rooted in Newar Hindu and Buddhist traditions unique to the Kathmandu Valley, remains an active part of the capital's religious life and draws both worshippers and curious visitors to Durbar Square.

Thamel, a dense warren of narrow streets just north of Kathmandu's old royal core, developed from the 1960s onward into the city's main tourist and backpacker district, packed with trekking outfitters, gear shops, and guesthouses that outfit the great majority of foreign visitors heading into the Himalayas — a modern commercial layer built almost entirely on top of what was, before the tourism boom, a residential neighborhood with little connection to the valley's older Newar architectural core. Rapid, largely unplanned urbanization since the mid-20th century has also left modern Kathmandu with serious traffic congestion and some of the worst urban air pollution in South Asia, driven by a combination of vehicle emissions, unpaved road dust, and brick kilns operating in the surrounding valley, a stark contrast to the meticulously planned temple squares that first drew UNESCO's 1979 heritage designation.

The wider Kathmandu Valley today functions as a single continuous urban area encompassing the historic city-kingdoms of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, whose modern municipal boundaries have effectively merged even as each retains its own distinct Durbar Square and, in Bhaktapur's case, a noticeably better-preserved historic core than central Kathmandu's more commercially developed streets.