For most of its history, Sajek Valley was a place you heard about only if you already knew the hills. It sits in the Kasalong range in the north of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in Sajek Union of Baghaichhari Upazila in Rangamati District, at about 1,800 feet above sea level. The valley takes its name from the Sajek River, and its settlements are recorded as dating back to 1885. For generations, steep terrain and the absence of a road kept it apart from Rangamati town, from neighbouring Khagrachhari, and from the wider country. That isolation shaped everything: how people farmed, how they traded, and how little the outside world knew about the place.
The change, when it came, was not gradual. It arrived with a road. The Bangladesh Army built the road through the valleys and steep ground of the Kasalong range over about ten years, and visitors began arriving in earnest in 2014, soon after the valley was connected to the rest of the country. Before that, as one photojournalist who had visited the area for more than two decades recalled, Sajek was neither well known nor connected by road to Rangamati or Khagrachhari, and it had no notable economic activity. The road did not simply shorten a journey. It rewrote the valley's relationship with Bangladesh.
A valley of villages, not just viewpoints
Sajek is often photographed as a sea of cloud, and the photographs are not misleading about the landscape. Morning mist settles over the ridges, and from Konglak Hill the eye travels across layered hills towards Mizoram in India, only a few kilometres to the east. But Sajek is not an empty viewpoint. It is made up of settlements, above all Ruilui Para, Hamari Para and Konglak Para. Konglak Hill holds the last village on the Bangladesh side, predominantly inhabited by Lusai people, while Tripura, Pankhoa and Chakma people also live in the valley, alongside Marma and other communities.
That matters because the story of Sajek's transformation is, at heart, a story about who lives there and what changed for them. Before tourism, many families depended on jhum cultivation, shifting cultivation on the hillsides, and on the small trade that a remote valley could sustain. Women have long played a central part in the valley's daily economy, running tea stalls, food stalls and roadside markets, and gathering fruit and vegetables in the early morning. Tourism did not replace that world overnight, but it layered a new economy on top of it, and the layers have not always sat comfortably together.
The resort boom
The numbers tell the speed of the change more plainly than any adjective can. In 2016 there were six resorts registered in the region. By 2020 there were 83, all members of the Cottage Owners Association of Sajek. That growth brought jobs, rental income from land, and new small businesses: restaurants, tea stalls, grocery shops, souvenir and handicraft stalls, and transport work for drivers bringing visitors from Khagrachhari town, about 67 kilometres away, and from Rangamati, about 95 kilometres away.
Research on inclusive tourism in Sajek records both sides of that bargain. Some local families began earning by leasing land to resorts and cottages, by working in resorts and restaurants, and by opening shops of their own. One account in that research describes Lusai residents who, only a few years earlier, had cultivated jhum, becoming business owners, with children studying in Khagrachhari town. At the same time, business owners from outside the valley also arrived, and researchers noted that local workers were sometimes recruited at lower wages than outsiders. The benefits were real, but they were not evenly shared, and the question of who owns, who works and who decides has followed Sajek ever since.
Tourism also exposed the valley's thin infrastructure. The road brought visitors, but water, electricity, health care and waste management did not always keep pace. The Ruilui headman has pointed to unplanned construction crowding the ridge, blocking views and increasing vulnerability to landslides, and has called for planned regulation to protect the valley's natural beauty, along with a health centre and schools for local children. These are not complaints from outside observers. They come from the people who have to live with the consequences long after a weekend's visitors have gone home.
Interruption and fire
Sajek's new economy has proved fragile as well as fast-growing. In 2020, tourism was halted for five months during the COVID-19 pandemic, a reminder of how completely the valley had come to depend on visitors. Then, on 24 February 2025, a fire broke out in the Ruilui tourist area and spread rapidly through resorts, cottages and homes. According to the Sajek Cottage and Resort Owners Association, the fire completely destroyed 32 resorts and cottages, 36 residential houses, six restaurants and 20 shops; district administration estimates put the total number of affected establishments higher, at around 95 to 98. There was no fire service station in Sajek itself, and fire units from Khagrachhari Sadar, Dighinala and Panchhari took hours to arrive. No single official cause was settled in the immediate reporting, with early suggestions including an electrical short circuit and a cigarette stub, and a district probe committee was formed.
The fire matters to Sajek's story for more than the scale of the loss. It showed how closely tourist buildings and family homes now stand together on the same ridges, and how a disaster in one part of that economy immediately becomes a disaster for the other. The administration first discouraged tourist travel for safety, then reversed that decision and kept the valley open, while allocating cash and rice assistance to affected families and business owners. For residents, rebuilding was not only a commercial question. It was a question of homes, livelihoods and whether the next phase of building would be safer and better planned than the last.
What tourism changed, and what it did not
It is tempting to tell Sajek's story as a simple before-and-after: remote, then famous. The reality is more uneven. Tourism gave many families cash income, wider connections and choices that jhum cultivation alone could not provide. It also raised land values, and researchers studying the valley have recorded the tensions that followed: disputes within communities over land, a shift from communal practices towards individual enterprise, and a sense among some residents that festivals and shared customs have lost some of their old centrality as economic life has changed. None of that means the valley was untouched before, or that every resident experiences tourism the same way. It means that change has costs as well as gains, and that those costs fall unevenly.
What tourism did not change is the valley's geography. Sajek remains a high, steep place, reached by a winding road, where weather, landslides and distance still set limits. Visitors still arrive in escorted convoys on parts of the route, and the valley still depends on a small number of peak periods, weekends, Eid, Durga Puja and the winter season, to carry businesses through quieter months. That seasonality is part of why a single closure or a single fire can feel so severe: earnings made in a few good weeks must stretch across the rest of the year.
Sajek's future, then, is not a question of whether tourists will keep coming. They almost certainly will, drawn by cloud, sunrise over Konglak Hill, and the chance to spend time in a hill community unlike anywhere else in Bangladesh. The harder question is whether the valley can keep the gains of the last decade — income, connection, opportunity — while protecting the land, the water, the safety and the communal life that made it worth visiting in the first place. That is a question for planners and resort owners, but above all it belongs to the people of Ruilui, Hamari and Konglak, whose valley this was long before it became a destination, and whose homes it remains after the visitors leave.