The Nanee: a courtyard hotel inside Bhaktapur’s living heritage

Bhaktapur sits about 13 kilometres east of Kathmandu, an old Newar city whose Durbar Square is one of the seven monument zones of the Kathmandu Valley World Heritage property, inscribed in 1979 ²⁶. It is also one of the few places in South Asia where a city has paid for its own heritage largely out of visitor money. That makes it a good place to ask what a hotel adds to a destination that already charges for its culture.

A city that charges for its heritage

Bhaktapur Municipality introduced a US$1 charge on foreign visitors in 1993 and raised it to US$10 in 2001 to pay for restoration; local tourism entrepreneurs warned it would drive visitors away, and the warning proved wrong ⁴. By 2020 tourism was the municipality's largest source of income, about Rs240 million in a year against Rs90 million of other internal revenue, and 91 of the 134 monuments damaged in the 2015 earthquake had been rebuilt or repaired ⁴. Reporting in 2018 put tourist entry fees at 35% of the reconstruction budget, and found that only traditional materials (timber, brick, lime mortar) were being used on historic monuments ⁵. Fee levels have changed since; the principle has not.

By 2025, Nepali Times reported, most monuments had been rebuilt at a cost of more than US$200 million, drawn from government funds, entry fees, taxes and donations. The town had declined some foreign assistance, including a €10 million German grant, in the belief that residents should rebuild their own monuments ¹³. Homes fared worse. More than 300 people died in house collapses in Bhaktapur; a government grant of Rs300,000 set against a cost of around Rs5 million for a multi-storey house left many families with high-interest loans or land sold cheaply, and some neighbourhoods were still in ruins a decade on ¹³. A vocational academy founded in 2013 trained masons, woodcarvers and stone carvers for the rebuilding ¹³. The monuments were restored first; the houses around them, where the living city actually happens, are a slower story.

The institutions behind the festivals

Bhaktapur's temples and festivals were historically sustained by guthi, Newar associations that fund rituals, festivals and communal duties from endowed land, a system dated to the Licchavi period ¹⁴¹⁵. After 1964 guthi land came under a state body, the Guthi Sansthan ¹⁴¹⁵. A 2015 commentary in the Kathmandu Post described the losses that followed: an amendment that allowed guthi land to be sold, land swaps that cut revenue, guthis shrinking to a few member families and festivals lapsing for want of funds ¹⁴. It cited a Guthi Sansthan source putting the number of annual festivals in Bhaktapur at 309 ¹⁴. In June 2019 a government Guthi Bill was withdrawn after protests led by Newar and other Indigenous groups ¹⁵. Today the arrangement is shared: for the 2026 Biska Jatra, the Guthi Sansthan's Bhaktapur office reported on chariot construction and an estimated cost of about Rs3 million, while the municipality convened the planning meeting ¹⁸.

Some traditions hang on narrower threads still. The masks for Bhaktapur's Navadurga dances are made each year by one Chitrakar knowledge holder and his family, twelve masks over 70 to 100 days, and are cremated at the end of each ritual cycle. The British Museum's Endangered Material Knowledge Programme notes that the mask maker feared the knowledge could be lost if it is not valued enough to continue, and that continuity depends on local patrons ¹².

Crafts under pressure

Bhaktapur's crafts are part of its visitor offer, and part of what is at risk. At Pottery Square about 150 Prajapati households once worked; by 2022 the Kathmandu Post found only about 40 people still in the traditional trade ¹⁶. Cheap imported electric lamps had cut demand for clay lamps, urban plots and brick kilns had covered the land where potters dug their clay, and none of the families interviewed had children in the business ¹⁶. Tourism had become part of what remained, with Rs150 potter's-wheel lessons for visitors, but the report gave no sign that it had made up for lost lamp sales ¹⁶. Four years earlier Nepali Times had described young people leaving for study and jobs abroad, with no next generation to take over ¹⁷.

Residents' own views are thinly documented. A small 2024 master's study at Aalborg University, based on six interviews, recorded new jobs and businesses alongside overcrowding, pollution and clashes between local customs and visitor behaviour ¹⁹. It is too small to generalise from, but it points to the questions a hotel here has to answer.

A hotel organised around a courtyard

The Nanee opened on 1 January 2023 with 18 rooms ²⁸. Nanee is the Newari word for a courtyard, and the building follows the courtyard-house tradition, with handmade brick, recycled timber and no perimeter wall ¹. It is owned by a Bhaktapur family that began with Thagu Chhen, a four-bedroom bed and breakfast, about a decade before ³. The hotel's own account describes a shared courtyard that opens onto the daily life of the city, a layout following Vaastu Shastra principles with zones for the five elements, and the building as a homage to the owners' ancestors ¹¹.

The hotel's community claims are specific in kind. The owners say it shares a public courtyard with local residents, and that its "Evening with an Artisan" takes guests into craftspeople's homes and workshops, giving them a paying reason to keep the craft going ³. The hotel reports that most of its team comes from the local community, and that it buys local produce and works with local artists and artisans ¹. Cooking classes and a small amphitheatre for storytelling complete the offer ¹².

Its sustainability page goes further. It claims a majority-local workforce and hospitality training for Bhaktapur's young people; partnerships with local guthi, schools and artists; retail and display space for local crafts; and collaboration on the Biska Jatra and Saparu festivals ¹⁰. It says it sources seasonal produce from farmers in Bhaktapur and neighbouring districts, uses LED lighting and low-flow fixtures, offers refillable water instead of bottles, limits single-use plastics and works with local recycling cooperatives ¹⁰. The page gives no figures for any of these ¹⁰.

What the record does not yet show

Everything above about the hotel comes from the hotel or from companies that sell it: its own website, its marketing collection, tour operators and a trade-association notice ^1231011. None publishes the numbers that would let a reader judge the community bargain: how many staff are from Bhaktapur and on what terms, how many young people have been trained, how much is spent with artisans, what guests pay into the workshops they visit, or what the guthi and festival partnerships contribute. Its place on Condé Nast Traveller Middle East's list of the best hotels in Nepal is a press recognition, not an assessment ⁷⁹. On our scale, the courtyard, the artisan visits, local hiring and the festival and guthi ties are announced, not documented.

Why it matters

Bhaktapur already has a working mechanism that turns visitors into conservation money, and it is public and municipal. A hotel whose whole proposition is the living culture of that city benefits from it every night. The monuments have largely been rebuilt; what is fragile now is the layer around them: guthi without land, potters without clay or successors, households still repaying reconstruction loans. The useful question for The Nanee, and for any hotel like it, is what it adds beyond the fee its guests already pay: income that stays in workshops, households and guthi, and evidence that shows it. Our Nepal Himalaya profile sets the national context, and Prakriti (official website), north of the valley, is a rural counterpart.