Malabar · Western Coastal Strip
The one place a Theyyam can be seen on any day of the year. Muthappan is performed here twice daily rather than on a seasonal calendar, the deity is offered toddy and dried fish, and there is no restriction on who may approach — a shrine that inverts almost every convention of temple worship in the state.
Best time: Year round; performances at dawn and in the evening.
A Bhagavathi kavu of the old Kolathunad on a laterite hill, and a short walk away one of the oldest mosques on the coast, rebuilt but continuously in use. The two stand within sight of each other on the same headland, which is the most economical statement of what north Malabar is.
A major Shiva temple of very long standing, with an unusually strict ritual protocol and a practice of resolving questions by prasnam — astrological inquiry — that other temples across Kerala refer to it.
Built by the Portuguese in 1505 on a headland over the sea, taken by the Dutch, sold by them to the Arakkal house in 1772 and taken by the British twelve years later. Four flags in under three centuries, on one laterite promontory, and the moat is cut into the rock.
The durbar hall of the Arakkal family, the only Muslim royal house in Kerala, who ruled from Kannur, held the Lakshadweep islands and — following the region's matrilineal custom — passed the title to the eldest member of the family regardless of sex, so a woman ruling as Arakkal Beevi was normal rather than remarkable.
About four kilometres of hard-packed sand behind a line of black rock, firm enough to drive on, and the longest drive-in beach in the country. Best at low tide; the rock keeps the surf off.
A small town with a disproportionate record. The British fort of 1708 stands over the sea; Odathil Palli is a mosque roofed in copper with no minaret; Hermann Gundert worked at Illikkunnu, where he published the first Malayalam newspaper in 1847 and later compiled the Malayalam–English dictionary. Cricket was played here from the early nineteenth century, the first circus school in the country opened in 1901, and the biryani is named after the place.
Nine square kilometres of Puducherry surrounded on all sides by Kannur district, French from 1725 until 1954, with French street names, a Tagore park and a distinct excise regime that explains the character of the road through it. M. Mukundan's novel of the town under the French is the reason many Malayalis know it at all.
The Bhagavathi shrine near Vadakara that the Vadakkan ballads name as the family deity of the Thacholi house. Kalari practitioners still come here, and the temple is the physical anchor of a literature that is otherwise entirely oral.
The old Muslim quarter behind the beach — the Mishkal Mosque, a four-storey timber structure built by a fourteenth-century shipowning merchant and rebuilt after a Portuguese attack, the Muchundi Mosque with its Malayalam inscription in Arabic script, and the large tharavadu houses of Koya families built round courtyards. Almost none of it looks like a mosque as most of India would recognise one.
The beach where Vasco da Gama landed on 20 May 1498, marked by a low stone pillar. What followed changed the pepper trade and the coast's politics; the beach itself is quiet and rocky.
The uru yards at the mouth of the Chaliyar, where wooden ocean-going dhows are still built on the sand, and a stone breakwater running two kilometres into the sea that the town walks along in the evening.
Not a cave but a cleft on Ambukuthi hill roofed by a fallen boulder, its walls covered in engraved human figures, animals and symbols cut over a very long span, together with later inscriptions in a Brahmi-derived script. Reached by a steep climb, which is part of why the carvings survived.
A Vishnu temple in forest under Brahmagiri, reached by a road that ends there, where rites for the dead are performed at a stream on the hillside. It is the plateau's oldest continuously used site.
The two divisions of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, continuous with Bandipur and Nagarhole in Karnataka and Mudumalai in Tamil Nadu. One elephant population moves across all four, which is why the region's conservation politics are settled between three states.
Best time: October–March.
Chembra rises to about 2,100 m with a small heart-shaped tarn partway up; Banasura Sagar is an earth dam whose reservoir left the tops of hills standing as islands. Chembra access is regulated and closed in the fire season.
Teak planted here from 1844, under the Malabar collector after whom the plot is named and by the sub-conservator who actually did the work, when wild teak was being cut faster than it grew. It is the oldest teak plantation in the world, the trees are enormous, and a forest research museum next to it explains the timber that built the ships.
Contiguous rainforest reached from Mukkali, and continuous with the New Amarambalam forest behind Nilambur — which is why it belongs to this region ecologically even though it sits inside the next district south. A proposed hydroelectric dam on the Kunthipuzha was abandoned after a long public campaign and the park was declared in 1984. Lion-tailed macaque is the animal it is known for.
A mangrove and mudflat estuary where the Kadalundi meets the sea, notified in 2007 as Kerala's first community reserve. Waders arrive from Central Asia between November and March and feed on the flats at low tide.
Best time: November–March.
A port at the mouth of the Bharathapuzha whose Juma Masjid, a timber building without minarets, was for centuries the region's principal centre of Islamic learning — students came from across the coast and the completion of study there was a recognised qualification. The scholar who wrote the sixteenth-century Arabic chronicle of the Portuguese on this coast taught here.
A temple town at the northern edge of the region, known for the knotted gold pavithra ring made by a handful of families, and the base for the Kavvayi backwaters, a quiet island-and-channel system with no houseboat traffic.
Places worth visiting in Malabar — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (21)