Food & markets · Beside Thamel

Take a quiet hour in the Garden of Dreams

A restored early-20th-century garden, two minutes from Thamel's traffic, with a café inside. Good for a slow coffee.

Best time

A weekday morning or late afternoon, when it is quietest.

How long

An hour or two, longer with a book.

Getting there

A two-minute walk from Thamel, beside the Kaiser Mahal on the way to Durbarmarg.

Directions

A neo-classical garden in the middle of the city

The Garden of Dreams was built in the 1920s as the private garden of the Kaiser Mahal, a Rana palace. Left to ruin for decades, it was restored in the 2000s, and today its lawns, ponds, pavilions and urns are a calm square of green just off the city's busiest streets.

Step through the gate and the traffic noise drops away. People come to read, sketch, have a quiet coffee or simply lie on the grass.

Making an afternoon of it

There is a café inside, with tables on the terrace looking over the garden. It is a good place to sit out the middle of a busy day, or to meet someone somewhere quieter than Thamel.

The garden is small, so you will see it all in half an hour. The point is to stay longer than that.

The history behind it

The garden was laid out by Field Marshal Kaiser Shumsher Rana in the 1920s, after a trip to Europe, and planned around six pavilions named for the six seasons of the Nepali year. Only some of them survive today.

The restoration that saved it, finished in 2007, brought back the fountains, the pergolas and the planting. It is one of the few places in the city where you can see what a Rana garden looked like.