The winter home of the black-necked cranes — the flattest valley in Bhutan, Gangtey Monastery perched on a ridge above the marsh, and the most serene valley landscape in the Himalayan kingdom
Phobjikha Valley (also called Gangtey Valley — named for the Gangtey Monastery on its eastern ridge) is a broad glacial bowl in the Black Mountains of central Bhutan, at 2,900m elevation, the only east-facing glacial valley in Bhutan and one of the flattest open landscapes in the Himalayan kingdom. The valley is most significant as the primary winter habitat in Bhutan of the black-necked crane (Grus nigricollis — a large, striking crane with a black head and neck and white body, sacred in Bhutanese Buddhism as a symbol of longevity, one of the rarest cranes in the world with a total populatio…
The Phobjikha Valley was settled by Tibetan Buddhist communities from the Black Mountain monasteries well before the unification of Bhutan (the Kingdom of Bhutan was formally unified by Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, a Tibetan lama who emigrated to Bhutan in 1616 and constructed the dzong fortress system that still defines Bhutanese civic architecture). Gangtey Gonpa (1613) predates the unification and represents the Nyingma school tradition (the oldest of Tibetan Buddhism's four main schools, associated with the 8th-century Indian master Padmasambhava and with the treasure-text tradition) that w…