Swat Valley 23&240307 (43)

Kot is a hill station in the Swat District of Pakistan. It is 4.4 km south of the town of Kalam on Route N-95, at an elevation of 2,034 m.

Swat (pronounced [ˈsʋaːt̪], Pashto: سوات) is a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, located close to the Afghan-Pakistan border. It is the upper valley of the Swat River, which rises in the Hindu Kush range. The capital of Swat is Saidu Sharif, but the main town in the Swat valley is Mingora. It was a princely state (see Swat (princely state)) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa until it was dissolved in 1969. The valley is almost entirely populated by ethnic Afghans/Pashtuns . The language spoken in the valley is Pashto/Pakhto. With high mountains, green meadows, and clear lakes, it is a place of great natural beauty and is popular with tourists as "the Switzerland of South Asia".

Swat (Urdu: ریاست سوات) was a province of the Mughal Empire ruled by local rulers known as the Akhwands, then until 1947 a princely state of the British Indian Empire, which was dissolved in 1947, when the Akhwand acceded to Pakistan. The state lay to the north of the modern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan and continued within its 1947 borders until 1969, when it was dissolved. The area it covered is now divided between the present-day states of Swat, Buner and Shangla.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Pashto: خیبر پښتونخوا [xaiˈbər pəxtunˈxwɑ]; Urdu: خیبر پختونخوا [ˈxɛːbər pəxˈtuːnxwaː]), locally called Pukhtunkhwa, and formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province and various other names, is one of the four provinces of Pakistan, located in the north-west of the country. It borders Afghanistan to the north-west, Gilgit-Baltistan to the north-east, Azad Kashmir to the east, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to the west and south, Balochistan to the south and Punjab and the Islamabad Capital Territory to the south-east. This is a disputed area that is also claimed by Afghanistan as their rightful territory.