Hill station

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"Summer resort" redirects here. For a children's summer holiday resort, see summer camp. For summer resorts in Canada, see cottage country. For resort hotels and resort towns in general, see resort.
Antsirabe, Madagascar
Tea plantations in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India
Munnar, Kerala, India
Garut, Indonesia
Fort Munro, Dera Ghazi Khan, Pakistan
Baguio City, Philippines
Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka
Da Lat, Vietnam
Genting Highlands, a hill station founded after the independence of Malaysia.

A hill station is a town located at a higher elevation than the nearby plain or valley. The term was used mostly in colonial Asia, but also in Africa (albeit rarely), for towns founded by European colonial rulers as refuges from the summer heat, up where temperatures are cooler. In the Indian context most hill stations are at an altitude of approximately 1,000 to 2,500 metres (3,500 to 7,500 feet); very few are outside this range.


Hill stations in India were established for a variety of reasons. After the revolt of 1857 the "British sought further distance from what they saw as a disease-ridden land by escape to the Himalayas in the north and Nilgiri Hills in the south", a pattern which started even before 1857. Other factors included anxieties about the dangers of life in India, among them "fear of degeneration brought on by too long residence in a debilitating land." The hill stations were meant to reproduce the home country, illustrated in Lord Lytton's statement about Ootacamund, in the 1870s, "such beautiful English rain, such delicious English mud."[1] Shimla was officially made the "summer capital of India" in the 1860s and hill stations "served as vital centers of political and military power, especially after the 1857 revolt."[2]:2

Dane Kennedy, following Monika Bührlein, identifies three stages in the evolution of hill stations in India: high refuge, high refuge to hill station, and hill station to town. The first settlements started in the 1820s, primarily as sanitoria. In the 1840s and 1850s, there was a wave of new hill stations, with the main impetus being "places to rest and recuperate from the arduous life on the plains". In the second half of the 19th century, there was a period of consolidation with few new hill stations. In the final phase, "hill stations reached their zenith in the late nineteenth century. The political importance of the official stations was underscored by the inauguration of large and costly public-building projects."[2]:14

List of hill stations in the world[edit]

Most hill stations are located in Asia:










Hong Kong[edit]


India is home to hundreds of hill stations. The most popular hill stations include:




Village of Namche Bazaar in Nepal



Sri Lanka[edit]








  1. ^ Barbara D. Metcalf; Thomas R. Metcalf (2002). A Concise History of India. Cambridge University Press. p. 111. ISBN 978-0-521-63974-3. 
  2. ^ a b Kennedy, Dane (1996). The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved 19 Aug 2014. 

External links[edit]