The oldest of the three Nilgiri hill stations and the one nobody stops at — the eastern shoulder of the plateau, where the British first came up in 1819 and where the mountain railway never arrived.
Kotagiri is the hill station the Nilgiris started with and then walked away from. John Sullivan came up here in 1819, before there was anything at Ootacamund but downland and Toda hamlets, and what he found at Dhimbatty and Kannerimukku on this eastern shoulder was the thing the East India Company had sent him to look for: a temperate climate inside the tropics. The house he built at Kannerimukku still stands. Within a few years the capital of the whole enterprise had moved fourteen miles west to Ooty, the railway when it came went up the other side of the mountain, and Kotagiri settled into being what it still is — a working tea town of twenty-eight thousand people that happens to have the oldest history and the best view in the district.
It is worth being clear about what this town is and is not, because a great deal of what is written about it is wrong. It is the oldest of the three hill stations. It is not the highest: Ooty stands at 2,240 metres, Kotagiri at about 1,950, and Coonoor lowest at about 1,850, so Kotagiri is the middle one. Its own elevation is argued over by everyone who publishes it — English Wikipedia says 1,950 metres, a Kotagiri resort’s own site says 1,847, and 1,793 is printed too, a spread of more than a hundred and fifty metres. We print the range and invent nothing between them. And it is not a municipality, whatever the encyclopedias say: the district administration lists Kotagiri among its town panchayats, and its municipalities are Gudalur, Nelliyalam, Coonoor and Udhagamandalam.
The name says who was here first. Kota-giri is the mountains of the Kotas, one of the indigenous peoples of these hills, and older records write it Kota-keri or Kota-gherry, the street of the Kotas. The Kotas were the artisan community of the Nilgiri economy — smiths, potters and musicians — in a set of relationships that also involved the Todas with their buffaloes, the Kurumbas in the forest below and the Badagas on the plateau. That arrangement predates every road on this page by a very long way, and the town’s name is the last public trace of it.
The centre is small and it is on a hill, and everything worth walking to is uphill from the bus stand. The town centre is 527 metres away and about six minutes; St Mary’s Church is 465 metres, Jawaharlal Nehru Park 790, and past those the walks become real ones — the nearest tea factory 1.6 km, Kannerimukku 2.9 km and thirty-five minutes, Sullivan’s house 3.0 km, and Longwood Shola 3.9 km and rather under an hour. Beyond the shola the town gives out into estate country, and the roads to the falls and the viewpoints become single-track between tea slopes.
What the place lives on is tea, and it lives on it differently from Coonoor. Coonoor is the trade’s administrative centre, with the auction and the association and the co-operative headquarters. Kotagiri is where a good deal of the leaf is actually grown, on smallholdings rather than estates, on a shoulder of hill that runs down steeply to the east. The slopes you can see from anywhere in the town are somebody’s two acres more often than they are a company’s two hundred, and the difference shows in the town: no colonial club culture to speak of, no grand hotels, a bazaar that serves growers rather than visitors.
The other thing this small town does is out of all proportion to its size, and it is the reason a certain kind of traveller comes here specifically. Since 1993 Kotagiri has been the headquarters of the Keystone Foundation, which began by surveying honey hunters and beekeepers in these hills and asking why the people who gathered the forest’s produce got so little for it. What grew out of that is a cluster of things on one road: the first Green Shop, selling wild honey and forest produce direct; Last Forest Enterprises, incorporated in 2010 to take that produce to market; the Nilgiri Natural History Society, founded in 2009; a community radio station, Radio Kotagiri on 90.4 MHz; and Aadhimalai Pazhangudiyinar, a producer company registered in 2013 that is owned and run by tribal producers themselves and that won the United Nations Development Programme’s Equator Prize in 2021.
And then there is the forest on the edge of town, which is the single most surprising thing about Kotagiri. Longwood Shola is 116 hectares of montane forest that begins three and a half kilometres from the bus stand, and on 24 May 2023 it was designated a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance — site number 2538 on a list that mostly contains lakes, marshes and estuaries. It is there because a shola is a wetland in the way that matters: it holds water and lets it out slowly, and this one supplies eighteen villages. It is the only major piece of natural shola left anywhere near this town, and it is small enough to walk across in a morning.
The last thing to understand about Kotagiri is where it sits. Coonoor and Ooty are inside the plateau and look across it. Kotagiri is on the rim, and it looks out and down. Seventeen kilometres east of the bus stand the ground simply ends at Kodanad and drops into the Bhavani valley, with the Moyar country and then the plains beyond; and the road below the town, State Highway 15, is the oldest way into these hills and has four hairpin bends where the Coonoor road has fourteen. Everything about arriving here is easier than arriving at the other two, and almost nobody does it.
Legend & myth
The rock east of the town carries the story the town’s eastern skyline is named for. Rangaswamy Pillar is a column of stone standing clear of the ridge, and the peak beside it is held locally to be the seat of the god Rangaswamy, who is said in the local telling to have quarrelled with his wife and moved here from the plains below, leaving the pillar as the mark of it. Pilgrims have long climbed to the peak, and the story is told here as story. What is not in dispute is that the two features are there, that they stand on an unroaded ridge, and that our own record for them was more than twelve kilometres wrong until this page was measured.
The waterfall’s name is a smaller argument and a more documentable one. Catherine Falls is generally said to commemorate the wife of M.D. Cockburn, the planter credited with introducing coffee to Kotagiri — that is what Tamil Nadu Tourism and the district administration both publish. Against that, the form St Catherine’s Falls appears to have been in use before the Cockburn story attached to it. We print both and resolve neither, because there is no source that settles it.
The bungalow at Kannerimukku is named for a stone rather than a person. Pethakal, the name the house has always carried, refers to a sacred stone that stood on the site before the house did — which is a small, ordinary and rather telling detail about how the first European building in these hills came to be where it is. It was not put on an empty spot.
More about Kotagiri
History
The Nilgiris entered British records in 1818 and 1819, and the entry point was here. In 1818 two assistants to the Collector of Coimbatore, Whish and Kindersley, came upon Kotagiri in the country below the Rangaswamy peak. In 1819 the Collector himself, John Sullivan, came up to see what lay behind what the Company’s order called the fabulous tales circulated concerning the Blue Mountains, and arrived at a village called Dhimbatty, north of the present town. He reported to the Board of Revenue on 31 July 1819. What he described was a temperate plateau inside the tropics, and what he proposed was a sanatorium.
Sullivan built here before he built anywhere else in the hills. The house at Kannerimukku — known as the Pethakal bungalow, after a sacred stone on the site — went up in 1819 and is generally reckoned the first European residence in the Nilgiris. It still stands, three and a half kilometres from the modern bus stand. He also began work on a road from Sirumugai, below the hills near Mettupalayam, up to Dhimbatty; that line is roughly what State Highway 15 still follows, which is why the Kotagiri ghat is described as the oldest route into the district.
Then the centre of gravity moved. In 1822 Sullivan built Stone House at Ootacamund — Kal Bangala to the Todas he bought the land from — and dammed the marshy valley there to make the lake in 1824. Ooty became the summer capital of the Madras Presidency; Coonoor got the railway, which reached it on 15 June 1899 and Ooty on 15 October 1908. Kotagiri got neither. It kept the first house, the oldest road and the original claim, and it lost the traffic — which is the whole reason it is the quietest of the three today.
The Nilgiris was constituted a district in its own right on 1 February 1882. Kotagiri became the headquarters of one of its taluks and one of its four panchayat unions, and a town panchayat rather than a municipality — the status it still holds. At the 2011 census the town had 28,207 people, 13,607 men and 14,600 women, a literacy rate of 86.79% against the state’s 80.09%, and 1,073 women for every 1,000 men, a ratio well above the state average of 996.
The planters left one institution behind. The NPA Centenary Polytechnic College was established in 1991 by a charitable trust formed by the Nilgiri Planters’ Association to mark its own hundredth year; it is a government-aided institution offering three-year engineering diplomas, and it sits alongside a District Institute of Education and Training that trains the district’s teachers. For a town of this size that is an unusual amount of tertiary education.
The most recent history here is conservation history rather than colonial history. Keystone Foundation was registered as a trust in Pondicherry in 1993 and moved its headquarters to Kotagiri soon after, beginning its surveys of bees, honey hunters and beekeepers on 1 April of that year with permissions from the Khadi and Village Industries Board. The Green Shop followed, then the Nilgiri Natural History Society in 2009, Last Forest Enterprises in 2010, and Aadhimalai in 2013 — first with fourteen shareholders drawn from the communities, later 1,609, later still 1,809. In 2021 Aadhimalai won the UNDP Equator Prize. And in 2023 the forest at the end of the road was added to the Ramsar list.
Why visit
For the oldest claim in the Nilgiris, still standing three and a half kilometres from the bus stand. Sullivan’s house at Kannerimukku went up in 1819, before Ooty existed, and it is now a small museum and documentation centre rather than a ruin or a plaque.
For a Ramsar site you can walk to. Longwood Shola was added to the international list on 24 May 2023 — 116 hectares of montane forest with 177 recorded bird species, fourteen of them endemic to the Western Ghats, and a frog described from the site itself. It is under an hour on foot from the town, and there is nothing else like it that close to any town in these hills.
For Kodanad, which is the best view in the district and not a close-run thing. The plateau ends and drops into the Bhavani valley, and on a clear morning after the monsoon you can see a very long way east.
For the road. State Highway 15 up from Mettupalayam is the oldest route into the Nilgiris, roughly Sullivan’s own line, and it has four hairpin bends against the Coonoor road’s fourteen. If hill roads make you ill, this is the way to come up.
For being twenty minutes from Coonoor and forty from Ooty while costing less and being emptier than either, and for being the closest of the three to an airport by a comfortable margin.
And for the reason people who know the Nilgiris well come here specifically: a small town that has spent thirty years working out how the people who live in a biosphere reserve can make a living from it, and that you can walk into on a Tuesday morning and buy honey from.
