Kathmandu Valley

The Kathmandu Valley is a bowl-shaped valley in the Himalayan mountains of Nepal, within Bagmati Province, covering about 665 square kilometers. It holds Nepal largest urban area, home to roughly 3 million people across the cities of Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur, and functions as the country political and economic center. The valley sits at a historical crossroads of the civilizations of the Indian subcontinent and the wider Asian continent, and it contains more than 130 significant monuments, seven of which UNESCO has inscribed as World Heritage Sites since 1979. The valley suffered severe damage in the April 2015 Nepal earthquake.