Palpa Districtपाल्पा जिल्ला

Palpa is a Mahabharat-range district of 1,373 km² wedged between the Kali Gandaki river on its northern boundary and the Tinau gorge that carries the Siddhartha Highway down to Butwal — the old and still the main hill road between the Tarai and Pokhara passes directly through Tansen. Above the town, Srinagar hill offers a celebrated panorama from Dhaulagiri to the Annapurnas. The 2021 census counted 245,027 people, down 0.61% per year from 2011; at 83.7%, Palpa's literacy rate is the highest in Lumbini Province.

Palpa is the heartland of the Magars, Nepal's largest indigenous nationality: at 53% of the population it is the only district where Magars form an outright majority, and the Magar language is the first tongue of a third of residents. Tansen rose in the sixteenth century as the seat of the Sen kings, whose kingdom at its height stretched across the central hills and Tarai, and later became a Newar trading town on the Kathmandu–India route; its cobbled lanes, temples and the Tansen Durbar (now a museum) preserve that layered past. The town remains synonymous with two crafts — handwoven Palpali dhaka fabric and the karuwa, a spouted bronze water vessel — and its old quarter was placed on Nepal's UNESCO World Heritage tentative list in 2008 as the Medieval Town of Tansen.

A half-day's walk below the town, on the bank of the Kali Gandaki, stands Ranighat Durbar — a Rana-era palace raised in 1893 by the exiled governor Khadga Shamsher in memory of his wife Tej Kumari and often called the "Taj Mahal of Nepal". The wider district lives from terraced farming, small trade and remittances, with Rampur in the Kali Gandaki valley its second municipality.