Most villages that host a festival are grateful for the crowds and otherwise unremarkable for the remaining eleven months of the year. Dhordo is not most villages. In October 2023, the United Nations World Tourism Organization placed this settlement of roughly 40 households, on the salt-crusted edge of the Great Rann of Kutch, at the top of a list of 260 candidates from 60 countries and declared it the Best Tourism Village in the World.
It is worth pausing on how unusual that sentence is. The UNWTO's Best Tourism Villages initiative, launched in 2021, exists to recognise rural communities that have built tourism economies without hollowing out the culture that makes them worth visiting in the first place. Winners in other years have included fishing hamlets in Oman, wine villages in Georgia, mountain communities in Peru. Dhordo — a settlement most Indians outside Gujarat had never heard of a decade ago — beat them all. For a resource on Rann Utsav that aims to explain not just how to book a stay but why this place matters, the award is the natural place to start.
What the UNWTO Actually Judged
It helps to be precise about what this recognition is and is not. It is not a beauty contest, and it is not simply a reward for tourist numbers. The UNWTO evaluates villages against nine criteria, and understanding them explains why Dhordo — and not, say, a more photogenic hill town — took the prize.
The criteria cover cultural and natural resources, the promotion and conservation of those resources, economic sustainability, social sustainability, environmental sustainability, tourism development and value chain integration, governance and prioritisation of tourism, infrastructure and connectivity, and health, safety and security. Applicant villages are scored across all nine, with particular weight given to whether tourism income actually reaches the community rather than being captured by outside operators.
Dhordo scored well across the board, but two areas stood out in the UNWTO's own commentary: the depth of Banni pastoralist and craft heritage on display, and the degree to which the village itself — not an external company — controls and benefits from the tourism economy. The tent city that forms the physical stage for Rann Utsav each winter sits on land governed through a cooperative structure involving the local community, which is precisely the kind of "value chain integration" the award criteria ask about. Visitors are not merely passing through Dhordo; a meaningful share of what they spend stays there.
Why This Distinguishes Dhordo from Other Festival Destinations
Plenty of destinations build a festival, market it aggressively, and see the surrounding villages become backdrop rather than beneficiary. What the UNWTO judges specifically rewarded in Dhordo was the inverse pattern — tourism infrastructure built around and in service of the existing community, rather than the community adapting itself to serve tourism designed elsewhere. That distinction is the throughline for everything else in this piece.
The Banni Heritage That the Award Actually Honours
To understand why Dhordo earned this recognition, you have to look past the tent city and toward the grasslands that surround it. Dhordo sits within the Banni, a roughly 2,500-square-kilometre belt of arid and seasonally flooded grassland along the northern edge of the Great Rann — one of Asia's largest grassland ecosystems, and home to pastoralist communities whose way of life predates the festival by centuries.
Bhunga Architecture
The traditional dwelling of the Banni is the bhunga — a circular, mud-and-dung-plastered hut with a conical thatched roof, built low and round for a reason that has nothing to do with aesthetics: this is a seismically active region, and the circular form distributes stress in a way rectangular structures do not. After the devastating 2001 Bhuj earthquake, bhungas in Kutch were among the few traditional structures observed to have survived largely intact, and the design has since drawn interest from architects and disaster-resilience researchers well beyond Gujarat. The exterior walls are often finished with lippan kaam, a relief mudwork technique inlaid with small mirrors, that turns a functional wall into a piece of folk art. Several accommodation categories at Rann Utsav, including cottage styles inspired by this tradition, borrow directly from bhunga proportions and finishing techniques, which is worth knowing if you are choosing between stay types — see our guide to the Rajwadi cottage experience for how this heritage translates into an actual room you can book.
Mutwa Embroidery
The Banni is also one of the subcontinent's great living centres of hand embroidery, and within it, the Mutwa community — a Muslim pastoralist group — practises a particularly fine style of mirror-work embroidery, distinguished by minute, densely packed stitching and an almost jewellery-like scale of detail. Unlike embroidery traditions that have become largely decorative exports, Mutwa work retains its original social function: it is made for dowries, for household textiles, for community occasions, and increasingly, sold directly to visitors during the festival season. Craft villages around Bhujodi and the wider Kutch region extend this picture considerably for anyone travelling beyond Dhordo itself.
Pastoralist Roots
Underneath the architecture and the embroidery is a still older way of life: Banni pastoralists have herded cattle and, more distinctively, the hardy Banni buffalo across these grasslands for generations, moving with seasonal water and grazing availability in a landscape that floods with the monsoon and turns to cracked white salt desert for the rest of the year. It is this rhythm — a community that has always worked in careful negotiation with an extreme landscape — that gives Rann Utsav its cultural ballast. The festival did not invent Banni culture; it opened a window onto something that already had its own logic and calendar. Readers curious about how that window came to be built in the first place should read our history of Rann Utsav, which covers the festival's origins as a state initiative distinct from this piece's focus on the UNWTO recognition itself.
Gujarat Tourism's Role in the Transformation
None of this heritage would have translated into a UNWTO award without deliberate, sustained state investment. Rann Utsav began in 2005 as a modest three-day event; by the time of the UNWTO recognition it had grown into a four-month tented festival season spanning November to February (now extended further for the 2026-27 season, running 1 November 2026 to 7 March 2027), drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors to a place that, absent this programme, offered essentially no tourist infrastructure at all as recently as the early 2000s.
Gujarat Tourism's approach is worth naming specifically because it is not the only model available. The department could have built the tent city, staffed it with imported labour and management, and treated Dhordo as a scenic backdrop. Instead, the operating model has consistently drawn on local employment for hospitality roles, procurement of local produce and craft, and — critically for the UNWTO's governance criterion — a structure in which village-level stakeholders have a say in how tourism activity is managed. Road connectivity to Bhuj, reliable power and water infrastructure, and coordinated safety and health provisioning across a temporary population that swells dramatically each winter were all built out over roughly two decades, not overnight, and all of it fed directly into the criteria the UNWTO scores against.
It is also worth noting what the state government did after the award, not just before it. The recognition was treated as a floor to build from rather than a finish line: subsequent seasons have seen continued investment in solar power for the tent city, waste management systems suited to a desert environment with no natural drainage, and expanded skill-building programmes for Banni residents in hospitality, guiding, and craft retail — the kind of follow-through that keeps a UNWTO title from becoming a plaque nobody looks at again.
Economic and Cultural Impact Since the Award
The most honest way to measure whether an award like this matters is to look at what changed afterward, and the changes in Dhordo are measurable rather than merely reputational.
For Artisans
Mutwa and other Banni embroidery, once sold primarily through intermediaries in Bhuj or Ahmedabad at a fraction of its value, now reaches buyers directly at festival-season stalls and through growing interest from designers and boutiques who came to know the craft through Rann Utsav's profile. Direct sale matters enormously in a craft economy — it is the difference between an artisan capturing the full value of months of stitching and an artisan absorbing a middleman's margin on top of an already modest wage. The UNWTO recognition accelerated interest from buyers and media who had not previously had a reason to look toward this specific corner of Kutch.
For Residents
Employment generated by the tent city and its surrounding services — hospitality staff, drivers, guides, vendors, security — is seasonal but substantial, concentrated in exactly the months when agricultural and pastoral income is otherwise thinnest. That timing is not accidental; it is one of the reasons the tourism model has been sustainable rather than disruptive to existing livelihoods, since it fills a gap in the annual income cycle rather than competing with it.
For Cultural Continuity
Perhaps the least tangible but most important effect is what recognition does for a younger generation's relationship to its own heritage. Crafts and building techniques that might otherwise have faced slow abandonment, as younger residents moved toward cities for work, now carry visible economic and reputational value at home. A Mutwa embroiderer or a bhunga builder in Dhordo today is not merely preserving a tradition out of obligation — they are practising a skill that a global body has explicitly identified as world-class, and that distinction has weight locally as well as internationally.
Why This Matters for How You Should Think About a Visit
None of this is meant to turn a festival holiday into a heritage lecture. But knowing what stands behind Dhordo changes what a visit can be. A traveller who understands that the mirror-work on a cottage wall is lippan kaam, that the circular room they are sleeping in echoes a genuinely earthquake-resilient design, and that the artisan selling embroidery at a festival stall is practising a craft the United Nations singled out as globally exceptional — that traveller sees a different place than one who arrives expecting only a desert camp with good Instagram lighting. For a side-by-side look at how Dhordo's tent city compares practically with its counterpart at Dholavira, including logistics and what each destination suits best, see our comparison of the two tent cities. Both are worth knowing, but only Dhordo carries this particular distinction — and it is one worth understanding before you go.
To experience the award-winning village for yourself, call our team on +91 92747 30220. Tent City packages start from ₹6,300 per person for a one night, two day stay, with two and three night options also available.
