Superlatives of Nepal: Biggest, Highest, Longest, Smallest & First

Few questions come up more often in Loksewa (Public Service Commission) preparation and general-knowledge quizzes than the 'sabaibhanda' family: which is the biggest, highest, longest, deepest or smallest thing in Nepal (Nepali: sabaibhanda thulo, aglo, lamo, gahiro, sano). The facts are real and well documented, but they are usually scattered across separate lists of peaks, rivers, lakes, districts, roads and disasters. This page consolidates the durable ones into a single source-cited reference, with each record carrying the same authority that backs its dedicated page on this site.

The records here fall into a few durable families: physical geography (highest mountain, longest river, largest, deepest and highest lakes), administration (largest and smallest districts by area, most and least populous districts, largest province by area), infrastructure (the longest and first highways) and history (the deadliest recorded earthquake). Wherever a figure can change with a new census, survey or climbing season, the date or fiscal year is stated so the number stays meaningful.

A word on precision: geographic figures such as lake areas, river lengths and lake depths are approximate and drawn from published surveys and standard references, so different sources may quote slightly different values. Administrative figures (district areas and populations) come from Nepal's official statistics and are exact within their own definitions. Where two credible figures exist, both are noted rather than hidden.

The single most famous superlative is the highest mountain. Mount Everest (Sagarmatha in Nepali, Chomolungma in Tibetan) stands at 8,848.86 m on the Nepal-China border in Solukhumbu, a height fixed by the joint Nepal-China geodetic survey announced in December 2020. It is the highest mountain not just in Nepal but on Earth, and it anchors the country's mountaineering economy; Kami Rita Sherpa holds the all-time summit record with his 32nd ascent on 17 May 2026.

The longest river wholly identified with Nepal is the Karnali, which runs about 507 km inside the country (roughly 1,080 km from its source near Lake Manasarovar and Mount Kailash on the Tibetan plateau to the Ganga). It is also Nepal's last big free-flowing river and gives its name to Karnali Province. The three great snow-fed systems (Koshi, Gandaki and Karnali) each run several hundred kilometres, but the Karnali is the longest single river.

For lakes, three records matter most. Rara Lake in Mugu (Karnali) is the largest lake in Nepal at about 10.8 km2 (some sources give 10.6 km2), a deep-blue oligotrophic lake at 2,990 m inside Rara National Park. Shey Phoksundo in Dolpa is the deepest lake in Nepal, with a maximum depth of 145 m recorded in a 2004 survey (a more detailed 2019 survey measured about 136 m). Tilicho Lake in Manang, at about 4,919 m on the Annapurna Circuit, is one of the highest large lakes in the world.

Nepal has 77 districts under the 2015 constitution. The largest district in Nepal by area is Dolpa in Karnali Province, covering 7,889 km2 of official statistical area, yet home to only about 42,774 people in the 2021 census, a density of roughly five people per km2. Dolpa is bigger than several whole provinces would be if they were single districts, and it contains Shey Phoksundo, Nepal's deepest lake, and the country's largest national park.

The smallest district in Nepal by area is Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley, at just 119 km2, about one sixty-sixth the size of Dolpa. Despite its tiny footprint, Bhaktapur held 432,132 people in 2021 and was the fastest-growing district in the country at +3.35% per year between 2011 and 2021. The contrast between vast, empty Dolpa and small, crowded Bhaktapur captures Nepal's demographic geography in a single comparison.

The extremes by population run the other way. Kathmandu is the most populous district, with 2,041,587 people in 2021 and by far the highest density at 5,169 per km2. Manang in Gandaki is the least populous, with only 5,658 people at a density of about three per km2, the lowest in the country. All these figures come from the National Population and Housing Census 2021 (reference date 25 November 2021).

Among Nepal's seven provinces, Karnali Province is the largest by area, covering about 30,213 km2 of the national total of 147,181 km2, roughly a fifth of the country. It is also the most sparsely populated, a land of high mountains and deep valleys such as Jumla, Humla and Dolpo, with its capital at Birendranagar (Surkhet). Fittingly, the largest province by area is named after the Karnali, the longest river.

The longest and most important road is the Mahendra Highway, also called the East-West Highway, which runs about 1,028 km along the Terai from Kakarbhitta on the eastern border to Bhimdatta (Mahendranagar) in the far west. Built section by section from the 1960s, it is the spine that ties the country together and carries the bulk of long-distance freight and passenger traffic. As of fiscal year 2022/23 Nepal's national highways together totalled about 11,799 km under the Department of Roads.

Nepal's 'firsts' anchor the same story. The Tribhuvan Highway (Tribhuvan Rajpath), opened in 1956, was Nepal's first proper highway, its switchbacks over the Mahabharat range at Sim Bhanjyang and Daman ending the era of porters carrying cars over the hills into the Kathmandu Valley. On Everest, the first ascent was by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa on 29 May 1953, and Junko Tabei of Japan became the first woman to summit on 16 May 1975.

Nepal's deadliest recorded earthquake is the 1934 Nepal-Bihar earthquake, known in Nepali as the Maha Bhukampa of 1990 BS. Striking on the afternoon of 2 Magh 1990 BS (15 January 1934) with a magnitude of about Mw 8.0 to 8.3, it killed 8,519 people in Nepal according to the official 1935 count, plus 7,253 in Bihar, India. It flattened large parts of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan; its anniversary, Magh 2, is now observed as National Earthquake Safety Day.

By comparison, the April 2015 Gorkha earthquake (Mw 7.8) killed nearly 9,000 people across Nepal and is the deadliest in living memory, but the 1934 event remains the deadliest single earthquake in the documented record on the strength of its wider destruction. Medieval chronicles describe the 1255 Kathmandu Valley earthquake killing roughly a third of the Valley's population, but no independent count survives, so it is recorded proportionally rather than with a firm death toll.

These records sit alongside the natural superlatives: the largest national park is Shey Phoksundo National Park (3,555 km2, in Dolpa), the largest protected area overall is the Annapurna Conservation Area (about 7,629 km2), and the smallest national park is Rara (106 km2). Together they show how many of Nepal's superlatives cluster in the same remote north-west corner of the country.

For students and Loksewa candidates, these superlatives are among the highest-yield facts to memorise because they recur across GK papers year after year. The trick is to pair each record with its context: not just that Dolpa is the largest district, but that it is largest by area (Kathmandu is largest by population), and not just that Shey Phoksundo is the deepest lake, but by how much and from which survey. That distinction between 'by area' and 'by population', or 'in Nepal' and 'total length', is exactly what separates a correct answer from a near miss.

Each record on this page corresponds to a full, source-cited profile elsewhere on Amarnepal: the peaks database for Everest, the rivers and lakes references for the Karnali, Rara, Shey Phoksundo and Tilicho, the districts library and rankings for Dolpa, Bhaktapur, Kathmandu and Manang, the roads section for the Mahendra and Tribhuvan highways, and the earthquakes archive for 1934. Use this hub as the index and follow through to any deep page for the full story, the exact figures and the primary sources.

Because durable records still shift occasionally (a new census redraws population rankings, a new survey refines a depth, a new climbing season resets the Everest summit tally), every figure here is tied to a date or fiscal year. When a record changes, it will change here and on its deep page together, so the two never disagree.