Key Monastery In Spiti

The Key Monastery is over a thousand years old, and apart from being the oldest, it is also the largest monastery which one can find in the entire Spiti Valley. The magnificent monastery is also a religious training centre for the Lamas, and about 300 lamas receive their education from here. It has a long and quite fascinating history that is attached to it: a long history that involves numerous attacks that the place had to face. Nevertheless, the monastery survived and celebrated the completion of its thousand years in the year 2000 in the presence of Dalai Lama.

Today, the Key Monastery is visited not only by locals but also by tourists from all parts of the country who come looking for it in order to seek calmness, silence and inner tranquillity.

The walls of the monastery are decorated with beautiful murals and paintings. The temples in the compound are all built on top of one another, and the building is marked by narrow corridors that lead to low rooms. The monastery has three floors in all. The first floor, which is used for storage, is mostly underground. The ground floor of the monastery houses the Assembly Hall which is beautifully decorated and also has cells that have been constructed especially for the monks.

One particular room that never fails to capture the attention of the tourists is known as Tangyur, which is a room that is richly painted with murals. The monastery which has an architecture influenced by chinese culture is famous for its style of architecture known as Pasada.