Surrounded by four larger neighbours, Pakistan is often overlooked on the world stage. And while rising in popularity, as of 2025 it is still one of the least-visited countries in the world.
Which is a shame.
Today, Pakistan is not only emerging as one of the most dynamic economies of the 21st century. It has also been present at virtually every major crossroad in human history.
Alexander the Great marched through the northwest in 327 BCE. The Silk Road cut across its plains and mountain passes between roughly 130 BCE and 1453 CE. And the Mughals left behind some of the most spectacular architecture in the world after their arrival in 1526.
Being at the epicentre of so many major historical shifts, it is really no surprise that Pakistan is now home to six UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They include the 5,000-year-old ruins of Mohenjo-daro, a city that had running water before Rome existed. And the Fort and Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, jewels of the Mughal empire that remain as breathtaking today as the day they were built.
In the 20th century, Pakistan found itself at the centre of the world's biggest power struggle. Positioned between the Soviet Union, China and the Middle East, it became one of the Cold War's most strategically vital players, a role that shaped the geopolitics of the entire region for decades. That history is alive in the ancient Khyber Pass, a route that has never truly been at peace, and remains one of the most geopolitically charged corridors on earth.
Pakistan has 230 million people, ancient roots stretching back five millennia, and landscapes that rival anywhere on earth. It is, somehow, still one of the world's most overlooked destinations. But not for long.
At Koryo Tours, we would love to take you there before the rest of the world catches on. Our trips are designed not just to show you Pakistan's breathtaking nature and historic sites, but to connect you with the culture and the people that make it truly unforgettable.
Long before Greece, long before Rome, one of the ancient world's most sophisticated civilisations was flourishing along the banks of the Indus River in what is now Pakistan.
The Indus Valley Civilisation, which peaked around 2500 BCE, is one of the four great cradles of human civilisation, alongside Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt and the Yellow River valley in China. At its peak it may have been the most extensive of them all, covering a territory larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined.
Its cities, including Mohenjo-daro in Sindh and Harappa in Punjab, were feats of urban planning that would not be matched for centuries: wide, grid-planned streets, sophisticated drainage systems, standardised weights and measures, and multi-storey brick buildings with indoor plumbing. Mohenjo-daro, whose ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site today, had a Great Bath and a sewer system at a time when most of the world was living in mud huts.
What happened to the Indus Valley Civilisation remains one of archaeology's great mysteries. By around 1900 BCE, the cities had been abandoned. Climate change, river changes, internal migration or some combination of all three are the leading theories. The civilisation left no deciphered written records, no known kings and no monuments to warfare. It remains, in many ways, a civilisation whose story has not yet been told.
In the centuries following the Indus Valley decline, the northwest of what is now Pakistan became home to the Gandhara civilisation, an extraordinary cultural crossroads where Central Asian, Persian and later Greek influences fused with the emerging traditions of the Indian subcontinent.
Gandhara is best known for the Buddhist art it produced from roughly the 1st to the 7th centuries CE: a distinctive synthesis of Hellenistic artistic technique and Buddhist iconography that created some of the most refined sculptures of the ancient world.
The region around Taxila, now a UNESCO-listed archaeological site near Islamabad, was one of the great centres of Buddhist learning in Asia and drew students from as far as China. Pakistan's Buddhist heritage is one of its most underappreciated assets: there are more Buddhist archaeological sites here than in most countries people associate with the religion.
In 327 BCE, Alexander the Great led his Macedonian army through the Khyber Pass into what is now Pakistan, beginning one of the most dramatic campaigns in ancient military history.
He fought his way south and east through fierce local resistance, founded several cities (the ruins of some of which are still being excavated) and reached the banks of the Beas River before his exhausted and mutinous troops finally refused to go further east.
Alexander's campaign left a cultural imprint that lasted for centuries.
The Greco-Bactrian kingdoms that followed his death established the foundations of Gandharan art. And the Khyber Pass, through which Alexander's army marched, has been the route by which every subsequent invader of the subcontinent has entered from the northwest: the Mauryans, the Kushans, the Mughals and the British all came this way. It remains, in a very real sense, the gateway to everything that followed.
Islam reached the Indian subcontinent through what is now Pakistan. In 711 CE, an Umayyad Arab general named Muhammad bin Qasim led an army through Sindh and pushed north, defeating the local Hindu Raja Dahir and establishing the first Muslim rule in the region at the age of just seventeen.
The conquest was swift and permanent in its cultural impact: Sindh and southern Punjab became the first part of the subcontinent to adopt Islam, setting the religious trajectory of the region for the next fourteen centuries.
The spread of Islam across Pakistan was reinforced over the following centuries by Sufi mystics, who brought the faith to ordinary people through music, poetry and an accessible spiritual message rather than conquest. The great Sufi shrines that dot Pakistan's landscape today, from the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan to Data Darbar in Lahore, are testimony to this gentler transmission of faith, and they remain among the most vibrant and culturally alive religious sites in the country.
In 1526, the Timurid prince Babur crossed into the Indian subcontinent through Pakistan's northwest and defeated the Sultan of Delhi at the First Battle of Panipat. The Mughal Empire he founded would go on to rule most of the Indian subcontinent for three centuries, and it left its most spectacular physical legacy in what is now Pakistan.
Lahore was one of the Mughal Empire's great capitals, and under emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan it was transformed into a city of extraordinary architectural ambition. The Lahore Fort, whose walls contain palaces, mosques and halls constructed over successive Mughal reigns, is one of the finest examples of Mughal architecture anywhere. The Shalimar Gardens, commissioned by Shah Jahan in 1641, spread across 16 hectares of terraced gardens, fountains and pavilions.
Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites and remain in active use today. The Badshahi Mosque, built by Aurangzeb in 1673 and once the largest mosque in the world, still dominates Lahore's old city skyline.
Beyond the architecture, the Mughals gave Pakistan its administrative traditions, its courtly culture, its culinary heritage and a Persian-inflected artistic sensibility that is still present in contemporary Pakistani music, poetry and design. The Mughal period's cultural inheritance is arguably Pakistan's most tangible living legacy.
The British arrived in the subcontinent through trade and stayed through conquest, and Pakistan's northwest became one of the most contested and costly territories of the entire imperial enterprise.
For much of the 19th century, Britain and Russia competed for influence across Central Asia in what became known as the Great Game. Afghanistan was the prize, and Pakistan's northwest was the battleground.
The Khyber Pass, where British and Indian soldiers faced constant raids from Pashtun tribal fighters who refused to be subdued, became one of the defining theatres of Victorian imperialism. The British fought and lost catastrophically in Afghanistan multiple times. They constructed forts, roads and telegraph lines across what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and drew the Durand Line, a 2,640-kilometre boundary between British India and Afghanistan in 1893, which ignored tribal territories and created the political geography that shapes the region's problems to this day.
The British also, somewhat paradoxically, documented and preserved Pakistan's archaeological heritage in ways that created the foundation for modern understanding of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The ruins of Mohenjo-daro were excavated under British auspices in the 1920s.
At midnight on 14 August 1947, Pakistan became an independent nation. It was one of the most traumatic births in modern history.
The partition of British India into two countries, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, was accompanied by one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Between ten and twenty million people were displaced, and between 200,000 and two million were killed in the violence that accompanied partition. Whole communities were uprooted in weeks. The Punjabi cities of Lahore and Amritsar, which had been mixed communities for centuries, were divided almost overnight. The trauma of partition is still carried in the memories of Pakistani and Indian families across the world.
Pakistan itself was born as a geographically unusual state, consisting of two wings separated by over 1,500 kilometres of Indian territory: West Pakistan (the modern country) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The two wings shared a religion but very little else: different languages, different cultures and fundamentally different economies. The arrangement was inherently unstable.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, died just one year after independence. He left behind a country of extraordinary complexity and enormous potential.
In March 1971, political crisis in East Pakistan exploded into the Bangladesh Liberation War. The West Pakistani military launched a brutal crackdown on Bengali nationalists, triggering mass atrocities and a humanitarian catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands and drove ten million refugees into India. India intervened militarily in December 1971 and within two weeks the Pakistani army in the east had surrendered.
On 16 December 1971, East Pakistan became the independent nation of Bangladesh.
The loss of East Pakistan was a defining trauma for Pakistan. The country lost more than half its population overnight, suffered a humiliating military defeat, and was forced to reckon with the failure of the idea that religion alone could hold a diverse state together. The 1971 war remains a source of painful historical controversy, particularly regarding the scale of the atrocities committed by the Pakistani military and the extent to which they have been acknowledged.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Pakistan's position at the crossroads of geopolitics became even more consequential.
Under President Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan became the primary conduit through which US, Saudi and other funding and weapons reached the Afghan mujahideen resistance. The CIA's Operation Cyclone, channelled through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was one of the largest covert operations in US history.
The war transformed Pakistan in ways that are still being felt. An estimated five to six million Afghan refugees entered Pakistan, creating one of the largest refugee populations in the world. The Kalashnikov culture and the narcotics trade that accompanied the war's economics changed the social fabric of Pakistani cities, particularly Karachi and Peshawar.
And the strategic alliance between the ISI and various militant groups created institutional relationships that would haunt Pakistani politics for decades.
When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, Pakistan was left with the refugee population, the weapons and the complicated legacy of a proxy war that had served US interests without resolution. The civil war in Afghanistan that followed continued to send shockwaves across the Khyber Pass.
On 28 May 1998, Pakistan conducted five underground nuclear tests at the Chagai test site in Balochistan, in response to India's nuclear tests of two weeks earlier. Pakistan became the seventh country in the world and the first Muslim-majority country to publicly test nuclear weapons.
The tests were met with international sanctions and condemnation but enormous domestic celebration. In Pakistan's narrative, the bomb was the ultimate guarantor of national security against a larger and hostile neighbour, and the scientists who built it, led by the controversial AQ Khan, were treated as national heroes.
The nuclear balance between India and Pakistan has shaped every subsequent crisis between the two countries, creating what strategists call a "stability-instability paradox": the presence of nuclear weapons prevents all-out war but creates space for smaller-scale conventional and proxy conflicts to continue.
The September 11 attacks in the United States transformed Pakistan's geopolitical position overnight. President Pervez Musharraf, who had come to power in a military coup in 1999, aligned Pakistan with the US-led coalition and reversed the country's previous support for the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
The arrangement was deeply contradictory. Pakistan became one of the largest recipients of US military and economic aid while simultaneously being accused of allowing militant groups to shelter in its tribal areas and of maintaining contacts with the Taliban. The decade between 2001 and 2011 was one of the deadliest in Pakistan's history for terrorism: suicide bombings hit markets, mosques, hotels and military facilities. Tens of thousands of Pakistani civilians and soldiers died in the violence.
The killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad by US Navy SEALs in May 2011, conducted without Pakistan's knowledge, deepened a crisis of trust between the two countries that was already severe. Pakistan's complicated position as simultaneously a front-line state in the war on terror and a country accused of harbouring elements of the enemy it was supposedly fighting shaped its international reputation for the decade that followed.
In April 2025, a terrorist attack on tourists in the Pahalgam area of Indian-administered Kashmir killed 26 people, mostly Indian civilians. India attributed the attack to Pakistan-based militant groups and, on 7 May 2025, launched a military operation codenamed Operation Sindoor, striking what it described as terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir. Pakistan responded with its own strikes and drone operations. For four days, two nuclear-armed states fought the most serious military confrontation between them since 1999.
A ceasefire was agreed on 10 May 2025, brokered with US involvement. It has held since.
The conflict caused significant disruption to travel and the region's tourism industry in May 2025, but normal conditions have since resumed. Pakistan's northern areas, which were not directly affected by the strikes, continued to attract visitors throughout the summer.
The episode is, however, a reminder of the structural tension that has defined the India-Pakistan relationship since partition, and travellers to Pakistan should stay informed on the current diplomatic situation when planning visits.
Pakistan is three countries in one, which goes a long way towards explaining why it is so difficult to summarise.
The first Pakistan is the great Mughal and ancient cities of the Punjab plains.
Lahore is the centrepiece. One of South Asia's finest cities, with a walled old quarter that takes days to properly explore, a food scene of extraordinary depth and intensity, and Mughal monuments that compete directly with anything in India for grandeur.
Mohenjo-daro, in Sindh, sits at the other end of Pakistani history. A Bronze Age city of haunting silence where you can walk the same streets as people who lived five thousand years ago. Peshawar, the frontier city at the foot of the Khyber Pass, is more complicated and more raw, a city where the ancient and the geopolitical collide in ways that feel genuinely irreducible.
The second Pakistan is the northwest.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and its tribal heritage, the Swat Valley (known as the Switzerland of the East, somewhat improbably but not entirely inaccurately) and the Gandhara Buddhist sites around Taxila.
This is where Pakistan's Afghan-influenced culture is strongest, where the Pashtun tribal code of hospitality, Pashtunwali, is a living reality rather than a historical concept, and where the landscape begins its dramatic ascent towards the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush.
The third Pakistan is the north.
Gilgit-Baltistan, the Hunza Valley, Skardu, the Karakoram Highway. This is where Pakistan becomes something entirely different and, for many visitors, the defining reason to come. Five of the world's fourteen peaks above 8,000 metres are in Pakistan, including K2, the second highest mountain on earth.
The Karakoram Highway, running from Islamabad to the Chinese border through some of the most dramatic mountain scenery on the planet, is one of the great road journeys in Asia.
The Hunza Valley, with its apricot orchards, ancient forts and Karakoram backdrop, has been drawing adventurous travellers since the Silk Road days and rewards them with exactly the combination of beauty and human warmth that the best travel destinations offer.
Pakistan has invested significantly in its tourism infrastructure in recent years, and the difference from even a decade ago is considerable.
The e-visa system, now available to over 192 nationalities, has removed the bureaucratic hurdles that previously discouraged visitors. Roads in Gilgit-Baltistan have been upgraded. Tourist police operate in major tourist areas. Foreign visitor numbers rose by 35% in early 2025 before the May conflict temporarily disrupted travel, and resumed strongly in the months that followed.
It would be dishonest not to address May 2025 directly. The four-day military confrontation between India and Pakistan, which saw Indian strikes on Pakistani territory and Pakistani counter-strikes, caused significant alarm and disrupted travel across the region.
The ceasefire that followed has held, and travel has normalised. Pakistan's northern areas, the main international tourism draw, were not directly affected by the strikes. The conflict does, however, reflect a structural tension in South Asian geopolitics that has defined the region since 1947, and anyone planning a visit to Pakistan should monitor the current state of India-Pakistan relations before booking and ensure their travel insurance explicitly covers the region.
Outside the India border areas and the specific tribal regions near the Afghan frontier (which require special permits and should not be visited without experienced local guidance), Pakistan is a remarkably safe destination for organised group travel.
Tourist police operate on the Karakoram Highway and at major sites.
The hospitality of Pakistani people towards foreign visitors, particularly in the north, is extraordinary and consistent.
The food, from the grilled meats and naan of Peshawar to the rich Punjabi curries of Lahore to the dried fruits and chai of Hunza, is exceptional throughout.
Koryo Tours runs trips that combine the cultural depth of the south with the mountain grandeur of the north. If Pakistan is on your list, the moment to go is now, while the crowds have still not caught on.
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