Kasol Is Trying To Be Manali — And That’s Exactly Why We Might Lose It

mansi sharma
Sep 9
6 min read

I still remember when Kasol’s roads were made for walking. When you could hear the river from almost anywhere in the village. When the loudest thing in the evening was a group of travellers laughing over chai, or someone strumming a guitar by the fire.

Kasol never needed attractions. It never promised you “things to do.” It was the place you came to undo. To take off the weight of routine, of pace, of noise.

But lately, I’m afraid. Because Kasol is trying to be Manali. And it was never meant to.

Why Kasol Cannot Be Manali

Space Manali can take the load. Its roads are wider, its valleys endless, its scale forgiving. Kasol cannot. It is two lanes — a hamlet, smaller than a village, intimate in scale. When a hamlet is forced to carry buses, SUVs, and oversized hotels, it doesn’t just look crowded — it begins to break. One wrongly parked car can bring the whole place to a halt. Kasol was designed for footsteps, not for traffic.

Attractions

Manali entertains you — with Solang, Rohtang, Hadimba, mall roads. Kasol never had, and never needed, attractions. Its gift was trails. Chalal, Grahan, Kutla, Rasol, Kheerganga — not tourist spots, but quiet paths that begin casually at the edge of orchards and lead you into stillness. Kasol doesn’t “show” you things, it makes you notice. When people come here looking for sights to tick off, they miss what’s right in front of them.

Hotels

Manali can hold massive hotels; its land stretches enough to absorb them. Kasol cannot. Every oversized hotel here feels like concrete pressing against soft soil. Kasol was meant for wooden guesthouses, homestays with small balconies, places where the family downstairs invites you in for chai. To build here as if it were Manali is to scar the landscape beyond healing.

Travellers

Manali belongs to everyone — families, honeymooners, large groups, quick weekend trippers. Kasol does not. Kasol is not for those who demand entertainment. It’s for those who linger — the slow traveller who measures days by cups of tea, the trekker who finds joy in silence, the digital nomad who writes with the river as their background music. When hurried tourism enters Kasol, the place feels crowded not just in body, but in spirit.

Who Will Truly Enjoy Kasol

Digital Nomads : who want to work with the valley as their co-worker. The internet here isn’t always kind, but the inspiration is. Ideas arrive when you pause to listen to the river instead of refreshing your inbox.
Trekkers : who don’t chase summits for photos but enjoy the soft rhythm of walking. Kasol is a doorway to some of the most beautiful trails in Himachal — and none of them need you to hurry.
Slow Travellers : who don’t come to consume, but to live gently. Who can spend a whole morning by the river and call that enough. Who understand that some places don’t need to be done, only experienced.
Retreat Organisers :who seek an authentic backdrop. Yoga, art residencies, sound healing — Kasol offers the silence that makes these practices real, not commercial.
Parents with young children who want their kids to touch soil, run on trails, skip stones in the river, and know nature as more than a wallpaper on a screen.

What Should Have Been Done

Kasol should have been preserved as a hamlet — not a small Manali, not a second Shimla. A hamlet is meant to be lived in slowly, to be discovered on foot, to be remembered for its silences as much as its sounds.

The roads could have been kept for walking, with only a few shared jeeps allowed in and out. Hotels should have remained modest — wooden guesthouses and family-run homestays that blend into the orchards, not concrete boxes that tower above them. The treks, the true heartbeat of Kasol, should have been marked and maintained, with limits on litter and footfall so the forests could continue breathing.

The orchards — apples, plums, walnuts — should have been kept sacred. They are not just trees, they are the identity of the valley. Instead of chopping them down to build another “riverside café,” they could have been preserved as spaces where travellers learned what it means to sit under fruit-bearing shade.

And most importantly, the culture of walking should have been protected. Kasol was always about wandering lanes, meeting shopkeepers who remembered your face, and reaching Chalal, Rasol, or Grahan with tired legs but a full heart. If Kasol had been kept as a walking-first hamlet, its slowness would have been its biggest gift.

Kasol didn’t need to be marketed as a “party hub” or a “mini-Israel.” It only needed to be what it already was — a place that encourages stillness, not speed.

What Is Happening Instead

Now, the two lanes that once held footsteps are suffocated with cars. Taxis idle in long queues. Loud bikes tear through spaces where even a conversation used to feel loud. The air carries more exhaust than the smell of pine.

Hotels rise taller than the deodars, built in concrete, their neon signs reflecting off the river at night. The warmth of wooden homes, where aunties served rajma-chawal and chai in steel tumblers, is quietly disappearing. Instead, cafés mushroom one after another, each competing to be trendier than the last — neon graffiti, EDM nights, Instagram walls. Charm has been traded for hashtags.

And the saddest shift of all? The question on most tourists’ lips:“What’s there to do in Kasol?”

That question never belonged here. Kasol was never about doing. It was about being. But now, travellers arrive looking for itineraries, checklists, entertainment — forgetting that the greatest thing to “do” in Kasol was simply to exist slowly: to sit by the Parvati, to walk into the forest, to watch the village lanterns flicker at night.

It hurts. Because once the magic of a hamlet is lost, it cannot be rebuilt. You can reconstruct hotels, pave better roads, repaint cafés — but you cannot bring back the innocence of a place that was designed to be small, intimate, and slow.

Kasol was never meant to scale up. It was meant to stay soft. And every time another orchard is cut, another guesthouse is replaced with a hotel, another café chases trends instead of peace — that softness is slipping away.

What Can Still Be Done

All is not lost. Kasol still has its river, still has its trails, still has its orchard paths where the air feels new every morning. The magic is quieter now, but it isn’t gone — it’s only hiding beneath the noise. To protect it, we don’t need grand projects or heavy interventions. We only need to let Kasol stay what it was always meant to be: a hamlet.

That means:

Fewer vehicles, more walking. Park outside, walk inside. Feel the ground. Let Kasol’s scale remind you that journeys don’t always need wheels.
Stay small. Choose wooden homestays, family-run guesthouses, river-facing rooms with no WiFi if you can. Every time you skip the oversized hotel, you keep the hamlet alive.
Respect the trails. Grahan, Rasol, Kutla — these treks are Kasol’s temples. Carry back your waste, don’t carve names on rocks, let the forests be.
Eat like a local. At the German Bakery opposite the Nature Park, at Usha Dhaba with its steaming thukpa and momos, in places where the food is humble and real. When you support them, you preserve Kasol’s heartbeat.
Slow down. Don’t come here for checklists. Come here to sit, to linger, to let a single day feel full without being busy.

Kasol does not need to compete with Manali, Shimla, or Dharamshala. It doesn’t need malls or manicured attractions. Its greatest strength lies in being small, intimate, slow — in being the kind of place where conversations flow as easily as the Parvati River, where children still run on trails, where you return not because you saw “everything,” but because you want to feel it all over again.

But for Kasol to remain Kasol, travellers must also choose differently. To come here gently. To take away experiences, not footprints. To remember that a hamlet, by definition, survives only when it is lived in lightly.

Because once the softness of Kasol is gone, no amount of hotels or cafés will bring it back.

And maybe that’s the most important truth of all: Kasol was never meant to be “done.”Kasol was meant to be felt.