Ura Yakchoe
Festival

The Festival in Detail

Five Days in Ura — How the Festival Unfolds

The Ura Yakchoe runs for five days, with the public programme occupying the final three to four. It opens with preparatory rituals inside the Ura Lhakhang — prayers, offerings, and the consecration of the sacred space by monks. On the following days, the Cham mask dances begin in the lhakhang courtyard. These are not the elaborate multi-day sequences of the great dzong festivals; they are village-scale performances, close and accessible, in a courtyard small enough that visitors stand a few metres from the dancers. The intimacy is extraordinary.

The core religious ceremony is a Vajrayana Buddhist meditation practice known as the Chana Dorje drubchen — a group ritual focused on Chana Dorje (Vajrapani), the Bodhisattva of Power, whose statue is the festival’s central sacred object. The practice text is based on a terma (treasure teaching) hidden by Guru Rinpoche and rediscovered by Terton Pema Lingpa (1450–1521) from Mendo cliff in Lhodrak, southern Tibet — making the Ura Yakchoe another of the many festivals in Bumthang shaped by Pema Lingpa’s extraordinary legacy.

The Chador statue — the Chana Dorje relic — is brought in procession from the village of Gaden at the beginning of the festival and installed in the lhakhang for the duration of the five days. Receiving its blessing is considered among the most spiritually significant experiences the festival offers. The main bronze statue of Guru Rinpoche in the lhakhang, believed to have been created by the 17th-century artist Pentsadeva, is also displayed for public veneration.

A Thongdrel — the large sacred appliqüé thangka — is unfurled for a brief period during the festival, offering the blessing of liberation through sight to those who witness it. Folk dances are performed alongside the Cham, and the community tradition of making rounds to village homes — visiting neighbours, sharing homemade food and Ara, reinforcing the social bonds of the community — runs in parallel with the formal programme throughout the five days.

Ura Village — The Oldest Inhabited Valley in Bhutan

Ura is described in local tradition as the oldest inhabited valley in Bhutan. It sits at around 3,100 metres in a wide, open bowl ringed by forests of spruce, pine, juniper, larch, fir, bamboo, and rhododendron. The village itself — about 65 clustered farmhouses, all traditional in construction — is one of the finest examples of traditional Bhutanese vernacular architecture anywhere in the country. Stone-paved lanes thread between the houses, which crowd together in the traditional Bhutanese style for warmth and community. The Ura Lhakhang sits at the centre of the village.

Ura is named after Urgyen Guru Rinpoche — Padmasambhava, the great Indian mystic who brought Buddhism to Bhutan in the 8th century. He is said to have first passed through the valley on his way to the court of Sindhuraja in Chagkhar. Since then, the village has been known as Urbay — the hidden valley of Urgyen — a name still used by older residents of the surrounding valleys. It is Guru Rinpoche’s second coming to Ura — when he arrived to end an epidemic — that the Yakchoe commemorates each year.

The valley is 48km east of Jakar, the administrative centre of Bumthang, on the road that continues toward Lhuentse and eventually Trashigang in eastern Bhutan. The drive from Jakar takes about an hour. The landscape around Ura — open meadows at high altitude, wildflowers in spring, the distinctive smell of juniper — is unlike the enclosed river valleys of western Bumthang and has a quality of spaciousness and remoteness that visitors find deeply affecting.

Things to Do in and Around Ura

• Ura village walk — the stone-paved lanes of Ura village are one of the best-preserved traditional village streetscapes in Bhutan. A slow walk through the village before or after the festival gives a rare sense of how Bhutanese rural life is organised and sustained.
• Shingrub Lhakhang — a small but ancient temple on the hillside above the village, associated with Guru Rinpoche and offering views across the entire Ura Valley.
• The Ura to Bumthang trek — the road between Ura and Bumthang can be walked as a full-day trail through meadows and forest, following a route that predates the road. One of the finest day walks in central Bhutan.
• Jakar and Bumthang Valley — 48km west, the Choekhor Valley of Bumthang contains Jambay Lhakhang, Kurjey Lhakhang, Tamshing Lhakhang (founded by Pema Lingpa), and the Mebar Tsho (Burning Lake). A stay in Bumthang combining the Ura Yakchoe with these sites is one of the most rewarding itineraries in central Bhutan.
• Mebartsho (The Burning Lake) — a deep gorge on the Tang Chhu river in the Tang Valley of Bumthang, where Terton Pema Lingpa dove into the water with a burning torch and retrieved sacred texts. One of the most important pilgrimage sites in the country, about an hour’s drive from Ura.