Six Senses Bhutan Opens Its First Three Lodges
The first lodges of a five-valley circuit opened in March 2019 in Thimphu, Punakha and Paro, designed to be visited in sequence across the kingdom.
Six Senses Bhutan opened in March 2019 with the first three of five lodges planned across the kingdom, in the valleys of Thimphu, Punakha and Paro. It was the most ambitious hotel project yet undertaken in Bhutan, a country that had limited tourism by policy and had only a handful of hotels at this level, and it had been several years in preparation.
The idea is a journey more than a hotel. The five lodges are small, with 82 suites and villas between them, and are intended to be visited in sequence, so that guests travel from valley to valley over a week or more, with the same standards and a continuing programme of wellness, walks and cultural visits at each stop. Six Senses calls the journey a khamsa.
Each lodge was designed around its setting. Thimphu, on a hillside above the capital at about 2,600 metres, is known as the palace in the sky, with reflecting ponds that mirror the clouds. Punakha, in a warm valley of rice terraces, takes the form of a farmhouse and has a lounge cantilevered over the fields. Paro stands among the ruins of a stone fortress above the valley of the country’s only international airport. The interiors are in pale timber, with the bukhari, the wood-burning stove found in Bhutanese houses, and rugs from the Himalayas.
The remaining lodges followed. Gangtey, a small lodge overlooking the valley where black-necked cranes spend the winter, opened in October 2019, and Bumthang, in a pine forest in the spiritual heartland, completed the circuit in March 2020.
The programme at every lodge includes meditation at sunrise, spa treatments drawing on Bhutanese traditional medicine, the lighting of butter lamps, readings by an astrologer, and hikes to monasteries and villages. The group presented the project as an expression of the country’s own philosophy of Gross National Happiness, with its emphasis on culture and the environment.
The lodges gave Bhutan a second circuit of this kind, alongside Aman’s, and made it possible to cross the western and central valleys in comfort. OKYTO’s Bhutan guide covers the country, and our Experiences describe the Trans Bhutan Trail and the tshechu festivals.
Continue
