Rawalpindi Division · Punjab’s northernmost district · 2022 gazette
Murree spent a century and a half as Rawalpindi’s hill station — a British summer line, then a weekend for the twin cities. On 14 October 2022 it became its own district: two tehsils, 738 km², the northern tip of Punjab. The postcard did not change. The file did. This page is written from the ridge, not from a Mall-Road stall.
The 2023 census counted 372,947 people in 66,187 households. Literacy 85.90 percent — 92.13 among men, 79.52 among women. That is the strongest district row in Punjab. Urban living on the census definition is a small share; the hotels make it feel otherwise. Punjabi about 44 percent first language, Hindko about 26 percent, a large “other” column that is how hill speech often arrives in the form. Phone traditionally 051; some listings use 0593.
Murree tehsil — 252,526 people, literacy 84.79 percent, the station, the Mall, the points. Kotli Sattian — 120,421, 88.20 percent, the quieter Sattian hills, the stronger reader of the two.
Mall Road is the old civic spine: GPO, shops, the crush on a long weekend. It is not wilderness. It is the town admitting it lives on visitors.
Kashmir Point, on the quieter eastern side, is a viewpoint — roughly 7,500 feet — looking toward the Kashmir ranges when the air is clean. It is not a chairlift. People walk from the GPO side and stand.
Pindi Point looks the other way, toward the Potohar and, on a hard-clear day, the suggestion of the plains. A chairlift runs from here toward Bansara Gali. Families treat it as the second obligatory photograph after the Mall.
Patriata — New Murree — is the chairlift and cable-car ridge about fifteen kilometres from the Mall. Forest underneath, a platform at the top, queues on holidays. It is the one ride this district owns without borrowing Ayubia.
Bhurban is the quieter hotel-and-pine address, a golf-course memory, less stall, more slope. Ghora Gali sits on the descent toward Islamabad — schools, a road town, the first taste of height for the car coming up. Mohra Sharif is the older Sufi stop on the same hills. Kotli Sattian is the other tehsil: ridges, Sattian villages, fewer neon signs, the literacy number that should travel with every tourist caption.
Nathia Gali and Ayubia sit next door in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This page will not steal them. The Galyat is a range, not a single municipal limit.
British Murree was a sanatorium and a summer line. After 1947 it became the twin cities’ escape. Construction, hotels, and a road that cannot hold every Eid car are the civic facts. Landslides and flood years are on the same file as the viewpoints — not as spectacle, as a slope that is lived on. The 2022 notification gave the ridge a deputy commissioner. It did not flatten the weekend.
Census 2023. District date 14 October 2022. Viewpoints from the published local map, not from a brochure that puts Abbottabad inside Punjab.
Murree was approved as a district on 14 October 2022. The notification was withdrawn in February 2023, and Murree was made a full district again in the Punjab notification of December 2024. (ProPakistani)
Two: Murree and Kotli Sattian, both formerly part of Rawalpindi District. (Dawn)
The 2023 census counted 372,947 people in the Murree (252,526) and Kotli Sattian (120,421) tehsil rows, then part of Rawalpindi District. PBS published no separate district total. (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics)