Ura Matsutake Festival

When it happens

The festival has no lunar rule. It is a modern harvest festival keyed to the matsutake season, and it is scheduled over two days. It falls in the third or fourth week of August.

The season is longer than the festival. The Sangay Shamu season starts in July and lasts through August and September.

Where it happens

The festival has no dzong and no named ground. It is held in the village of Ura, and the village’s temples belong to its religious calendar rather than to this festival.

Ura sits at about 3,100 metres in eastern Bumthang, roughly 48 km from Jakar town, just before Thrumshingla. It is one of the highest valleys in the country reachable by vehicle. With 60 to 70 households and around 400 residents, it is among the largest clustered villages in central Bhutan. Spruce, fir, pine and rhododendron forest rings the valley above fields of cereals, which earned it the name Ura Serzhong (the Golden Bowl Valley).

The forest of the Ura Valley is one of two places in Bhutan where Sangay Shamu is native. It grows in clusters at the base of pine trees. The national highway runs through the matsutake ground, and a farm road reaches Shingkhar, where the mushroom grows in abundance. Residents describe this as the reason outsiders can pick there.

History

The festival is usually described as a community festival with an economic purpose and no religious founding.

The Tourism Council of Bhutan funded the festival for its first three to four years. Phrumsengla National Park, which is based in Ura, supported it financially for several years, then began withdrawing that support.

The festival has not run every year. It lapsed for nearly three years, then returned to Ura for the first time since the pandemic.

The festival is meant as a tribute to the connection between the people of Ura and the forests around the village, and to the place of Sangay Shamu in their lives and livelihoods. The chairperson of the Somthrang Mushroom Group has said a guaranteed budget would let the festival be a marketplace for farmers who cannot sell their mushrooms elsewhere.

What happens

This festival and the Genekha Matsutake Festival in Thimphu are usually described together, as offering mushroom-picking excursions, mushroom dishes to sample, cultural performances by locals and school children, and local sports.

The festival is not a cycle of cham (sacred masked dances). Ura’s religious festivals are separate from it.

Being there

From Jakar the drive to Ura takes around one and a half hours along the east-west highway. From Thimphu it is about nine hours. Allow time for gentle hikes to neighbouring hamlets such as Shingkhar and to the valley’s temples.

The Genekha Matsutake Festival, in Thimphu district, is a separate festival built on the same mushroom. Press coverage also calls the Thimphu festival the Matsutake Festival, so check the venue and date.