International Yoga Festival, Rishikesh

The International Yoga Festival in Rishikesh runs each year around International Yoga Day in early March, drawing yoga teachers, practitioners and students from dozens of countries to a city widely regarded as the birthplace of modern yoga tourism. Rishikesh's status here isn't a marketing invention — the city has hosted ashrams and yoga schools for generations, most famously drawing the Beatles to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in 1968, and the festival grew directly out of that decades-long tradition rather than being created from scratch to attract tourism.

Over the course of a week, the festival programme runs multiple simultaneous tracks across different yoga traditions — Hatha, Ashtanga, Kundalini and others — alongside meditation practices, pranayama breathing sessions, and Ayurveda workshops taught by instructors ranging from well-known international teachers to respected traditional practitioners based in Rishikesh itself. Many sessions take place directly on the banks of the Ganges, with the Himalayan foothills as a backdrop, a genuinely different setting from a typical studio-based yoga retreat elsewhere in the world.

The festival welcomes practitioners of every level, from complete beginners taking their first class to advanced teachers attending for the specific instructors on the programme that year, and the schedule is generally structured so people can pick and choose sessions rather than commit to a single fixed track throughout. Beyond the festival itself, Rishikesh's broader yoga culture runs year-round — ashrams, yoga schools and the city's genuinely spiritual atmosphere along the Ganges make it worth visiting outside festival dates too, and many travellers combine a festival trip with a few extra days exploring the wider town, including the iconic Lakshman Jhula suspension bridge and the evening Ganga Aarti fire ceremony held along the riverbanks each night.