'Spiti' literally means 'middle land', though there are various hypotheses about how the valley got its name. Was it derived from that of the mythological king, Ashwapati, of the Mahabharata? Or, from that of a local ruler, Spiti Thakur, who, with his gang of dacoits, looted his own people? Or is it a derivative of Bi-ti? Bi means invisible or hidden, and Ti is water. Or does it come from Chiti? Chiti , very simply, means Paradise. Be that as it may, it only adds to the mystery that is Spiti.

Indeed, as Rudyard Kipling wrote in Kim , Spiti is "…a world within a world…" It is a traveler, trekker and photographer's delight. There is a road, metalled only in parts, that runs the length of the valley, through the moonscape (calling it landscape would be doing it grave injustice) with its rivers, stark slopes, glaciers and snow-capped peaks.

Named after the river that flows through it, Spiti is a vast highland basin for swift flowing glacial streams that have cut deep gorges into the mountain terrain. Among them Pin and Lingti are the main streams that feed the Spiti River. The Lingti valley is a living geological museum noted for its shales and fossils, dating as far back as 250 million years. In fact innumerable fossils of maritime life have been found in Spiti. The Tethys Sea is known to have existed in this area till about 60 million years ago, before the Indian subcontinent broke away from Gondwanaland and crashed into Eurasia (an erstwhile constituent of Laurasia), leading to the birth of the Himalayas. The area abounds in ammonites, or fossils of cephalopods. Cephalopods are the highest class of molluscs -- usually large, exclusively marine animals, including cuttlefish, squid, octopus -- whose legs are modified into arms or tentacles surrounding the mouth. These creatures probably died around 100 million years ago. Shale, a kind of rock that splits easily into thin layers and which is usually found along bedding planes, is further proof of the existence of the Tethys Sea. Samples of Spiti shale and ammonites are exhibited in the Sedgwick Museum at Cambridge.

For more than a thousand years now Spiti has been predominantly Vajrayana Buddhist (often referred to as Tibetan Buddhist). A sub-division of district Lahaul-Spiti in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, it forms an integral part of the larger Tibetan Buddhist cultural sphere, and has, at various points in history, been a part of the Tibetan realm. Isolated in its deep valleys the culture of Spiti has developed undisturbed, in a little world that centres round its Buddhist gompas (monasteries) and lakhangs (temples dedicated to deities). Dhangkar, Tabo, Key, Ghungri and Tangyud are the 5 major gompas. Of these, the first three belong to the Gelug-pa order of Vajrayana Buddhism, while Tangyud belongs to the Sakya-pa school, and Ghungri to Nyingma-pa. Only the Kagyu-pa order is not represented in any of the monasteries in Spiti.