By Riyaz Wani
A little over a year ago, the April 22, 2025 terror attack in Pahalgam killed 25 tourists and a local guide, triggering mass cancellations and a fear that visitors simply would not return. Today, that fear looks increasingly misplaced. Kashmir’s tourism recovery is real, and it is backed by hard numbers.
More than five lakh tourists visited Kashmir in just the first four and a half months of 2026, with April alone recording over 1.32 lakh arrivals. This comes after a record-setting 2024, when the Valley had welcomed 34.98 lakh visitors, including more than 43,000 foreign tourists, before the Pahalgam attack disrupted the momentum. Hotels are filling up again. Houseboats on Dal Lake are occupied. Restaurants are bustling. The recovery, by most visible measures, is well underway.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, addressing the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly while winding up the discussion on Demands for Grants, acknowledged the scale of what was achieved. He said his government had worked “step by step” to revive tourism in the aftermath of the attack, at a time when many in the industry believed visitors would not return to the Union Territory for years. He also announced that all currently closed tourist destinations are expected to reopen by May and revealed plans to introduce nine new tourist destinations to diversify the sector further.
Most tourists continue to follow the same well-worn circuit of Srinagar, Gulmarg, Pahalgam and Sonamarg, concentrating crowds at a handful of destinations while large parts of the Valley remain largely untouched by tourism’s economic benefits. Kashmir’s challenge, increasingly, is not attracting tourists. It is persuading them to go beyond the same four destinations.
This is precisely why the government’s infrastructure push and connectivity improvements matter. The June breakthrough of the 13.153-km Zojila Tunnel, achieved six months ahead of schedule, promises to reduce travel time across the treacherous Zojila Pass from up to 90 minutes to just 15 minutes, potentially opening Ladakh to year-round tourism for the first time. Chief Minister Abdullah called it the culmination of a long-held aspiration: “I would like to congratulate the people of Ladakh… We have now reached a point where Kashmir and Ladakh are connected throughout the year in the real sense.”
Calling the project a landmark achievement for India’s infrastructure sector, Gadkari said, “It is a good day for infrastructure in India, as this tunnel will soon become the lifeline of Kashmir, Ladakh and Leh.”
The broader direction is being shaped by an unlikely conversation partner. Switzerland’s Ambassador to India, Maya Tissafi, recently visited Jammu and Kashmir and held discussions on sustainable tourism, vocational training, food processing and agriculture. Visiting Gulmarg, she drew a pointed comparison between the two mountain destinations: “Bollywood made both Switzerland and Gulmarg unforgettable on screen. Seeing Gulmarg for the first time, I could understand why filmmakers keep returning to these valleys. However, beyond the beauty, mountain regions also share common responsibilities — resilience, sustainable tourism and disaster risk reduction.”
The Swiss model is instructive precisely because it was never accidental. It was built on trained people, careful destination management and a deliberate insistence on quality over volume. Kashmir has the raw material many destinations can only dream of: mountains, lakes, saffron fields, a living craft tradition, and a cuisine carrying centuries of history. What it needs now is the infrastructure to match that natural inheritance.
