Aerial View of Ooty; The Queen of Nilgiris….
Udagamandalam (also known as Ootacamund and abbreviated as Udhagai or Ooty) is a town and municipality in Tamil Nadu, India. It is located 86 km north of Coimbatore and 128 km south of Mysore and is the capital of the Nilgiris district. It is a popular hill station located in the Nilgiri Hills.
Originally occupied by the Toda people, the area came under the rule of the East India Company at the end of the 18th century. The economy is based on tourism and agriculture, along with the manufacture of medicines and photographic film. The town is connected by the Nilgiri ghat roads and Nilgiri Mountain Railway. Its natural environment attracts tourists and it is a popular summer destination.
Sit back and relax as I take you on a journey through the home of the Blue Mountains and the capital of the Nilgiris. Experience Ooty’s terrace-farming, hillside townships, valleys of tea gardens, mountains and lakes of the Queen of Hill Stations! – Jaseel Muhammed Keloth.
The origin of the name is obscure. The first known written mention of the place is given as Wotokymund in a letter of March 1821 to the Madras Gazette from an unknown correspondent. In early times it was called OttakalMandu. “Mund” is the Anglicised form of the Toda word for a village, Mandu. The first part of the name is probably a corruption of the local name for the central region of the Nilgiri Plateau.
The stem of the name (Ootaca) comes from the local language in which Otha-Cal literally means “single stone”. This is perhaps a reference to a sacred stone revered by the local Toda people. The name probably changed under British rules from Udagamandalam to Ootacamund, and later was shortened to Ooty.
Ooty is in the Nilgiri hills, meaning the “blue mountains”, so named due to the Kurunji flower which blooms every twelve years giving the slopes a bluish tinge. Because of the mountains and green valleys, Ooty is known as the Queen of Hill Stations.
