Key Monastery

Key (also spelled Kye or Kee) Gompa stands on a conical hill above the Spiti River at roughly 4,166 metres, and from a distance it looks less like a building than a growth of the rock itself: whitewashed cells and prayer halls stacked one above another up the slope, crowned by a temple at the summit. The arrangement follows the fortress-like dzong pattern of the Himalaya, and it is the largest monastery in the Spiti Valley — a high, dry, almost treeless landscape where the white walls catch the light against bare brown mountains.

Its origins are traced to the eleventh century and to Dromtön, a disciple of the Indian teacher Atisha, though what stands today is the product of repeated rebuilding. Mongol raiders plundered it in the seventeenth century; it was sacked again during the wars between Ladakh and Kullu around 1821, damaged by Dogra and Sikh forces in 1841, swept by fire in the same decade and shaken by an earthquake in 1975. Each time the monks returned and built again, which is why the complex reads as a palimpsest of rooms of different ages rather than a single design. It now belongs to the Gelug school, alongside Tabo and Dhankar, the other great gompas of the valley.

Inside, the interest lies in the painted rooms. Murals of the fourteenth-century style, showing a Chinese influence in their figures and clouds, cover the walls, and a chamber known for its painted Tangyur collection holds old manuscripts, images and ritual objects. Key is no museum: it is one of the main training centres for lamas in the region, home to a community of roughly 250 monks who live there year round, and the head of the house is regarded as a reincarnation of the great translator Rinchen Zangpo. In 2000 the Dalai Lama came for the monastery's millennium celebrations and consecrated a new prayer hall.

The best way to see Key is from the road below or the slopes opposite, where the whole stepped mass of the gompa rises against the mountain — then look down from its terraces along the broad, stony riverbed of the Spiti.

Getting there

Key sits about 12 km north of Kaza, the main town of Spiti, and is reached by a side road off the valley highway. The nearest airport is Kullu Manali Airport (KUU) at Bhuntar, about 93 km away in a straight line but much further by road across the mountains; Manali is roughly 210 km away by road.