Syangja Districtस्याङग्जा जिल्ला

Syangja is a densely settled mid-hill district of 1,164 km² immediately south of Pokhara, drained by the Aandhikhola and bounded on the west by the Kali Gandaki. The Siddhartha Highway from Pokhara to the Tarai runs the district's length, stringing together the headquarters Putalibazar and the commercial hub of Waling. Its slopes are among the most intensively terraced in Nepal, and the district has become the country's leading producer of mandarin oranges — around 22,000 tonnes in 2023 — with coffee emerging as a second cash crop.

The district's flagship piece of infrastructure is the Kaligandaki A Hydroelectric Power Station at Mirmi, where the Kali Gandaki meets the Aandhikhola: a 144 MW peaking run-of-river plant with three 48 MW turbines, owned by the Nepal Electricity Authority and commissioned in 2002, it was Nepal's largest power plant for nearly two decades and remains the backbone of supply toward Pokhara and Butwal. The earlier Aandhikhola scheme, which pairs power generation with irrigation tunnelled under the watershed, made the district an early proving ground for Nepali hydropower engineering.

Syangja's people — Brahmin, Magar, Chhetri, Gurung, Newar and Dalit communities across eleven local levels, the most of any Gandaki district alongside Gorkha — numbered 253,024 in 2021, down from 289,148 in 2011. That −1.28% annual decline is the fastest in the province, and the sex ratio of 85.57 males per 100 females is the province's lowest: Syangja sits at the heart of Nepal's male out-migration belt, even as literacy (81.7%) stays well above the national average. The old Bhirkot Durbar recalls one of the Chaubisi principalities from which the district was assembled, and the Gurung village of Sirubari, south of Putalibazar, is credited with pioneering Nepal's village-homestay tourism.