Ooty, "The Queen of the Hill Stations" is the administrative centre of the Nilgiri district.

It was recorded as long ago as 1117 that the Nilgiris were seized by Vishnu Vardhana, the King of the Hoysalas, and that it was the land of the Todas.

An enigmatic Jesuit priest, Father Fininicio, made the first expedition by a European to the Nilgiris in 1603. He made the journey up from Calicut, but all that remains of his visit to Todamala is a small fragment that reveals that he tried to converse with the Badagas about Christianity and that he gave "Toda women looking glasses and hanks of thread, with which they were very much pleased".

Nearly two centuries later, in 1799, the Nilgiris were handed to the East India Company by a treaty signed by Tipu Sultan.

It was in 1818 that two youthful Assistant Collectors of Coimbatore, Whish and Kindersley, made it to the Nilgiri plateau. It is not known why they made the journey, but one story has it that they may have been on a shooting expedition, another that they were chasing tobacco smugglers.

Their account of their explorations, which were of a place that was cool and teeming with game and wildfowl, stoked the interest of John Sullivan, who was then the Permanent Collector of Coimbatore.

In January of the following year John Sullivan set out from Coimbatore to the Nilgiri Mountains and made camp at Dimbhatti, just north of Kotagiri. The letter he wrote from the "Neilgherry hills" to Thomas Munro, who went on to become Governor of Madras, is euphoric. "This is the finest country ever... it resembles I suppose Switzerland more than any other part of Europe... the hills beautifully wooded and fine strong spring with running water in every valley."