Places

Ellora CavesHeritageUNESCOChhatrapati Sambhajinagar

Thirty-four numbered caves cut into a two-kilometre basalt escarpment between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries — twelve Buddhist, seventeen Hindu, five Jain, worked in overlapping periods rather than in sequence. The site is on the old route from the Konkan ports up onto the plateau, which is why it is here at all. Cave 16, the Kailasa, was cut downward out of the living rock and is the largest monolithic excavation anywhere.

Best time: November–February, and closed on Tuesdays. Getting there: 30 km from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar by road, at Verul.

Ajanta CavesHeritageUNESCOChhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Soygaon taluka)

Thirty Buddhist caves in a horseshoe gorge above the Waghur, cut in two widely separated phases — a Satavahana-era group from around the second century BCE, and a Vakataka group of the late fifth century CE under Harishena. The surviving wall painting is the largest body of ancient Indian painting anywhere. Administratively the caves are in Marathwada; physically they sit on the far side of the Ajanta watershed, draining north into the Tapi, and they are 59 km from Jalgaon in Khandesh against 104 km from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar — which is why most visitors arrive from Khandesh and why the region's claim on them is a district boundary rather than a cultural one.

Best time: November–February; closed on Mondays. Getting there: Buses from Fardapur on the Jalgaon–Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar road; private vehicles stop 4 km short and shuttle in.

Daulatabad (Devagiri) FortHeritageChhatrapati Sambhajinagar

A conical hill about 200 m high whose lower slopes the Yadavas cut away to leave 50 m of vertical scarp, ringed by a rock-cut moat. The only way up is a single dark gallery driven through the rock, wide enough for two, with a false side-passage to mislead attackers and a mid-way grating that could be used as a fire-pit to fill the tunnel with smoke. Built by Bhillama V around 1187; renamed and made Muhammad bin Tughluq's capital in 1327, a decision he reversed in 1334.

Best time: November–February, and start early — the climb is unshaded.

Bibi ka MaqbaraHeritageChhatrapati Sambhajinagar

Azam Shah's tomb for his mother Dilras Banu Begum, built 1668–69 to a design by Ata-ullah, son of the Taj Mahal's principal architect. The budget was about seven lakh rupees against the Taj's order of magnitude, and the compromise is visible as a horizontal line — marble up to dado level and around the dome, plastered basalt in between. It is the most honest building of its class in India about what it could not afford.

Aurangabad CavesHeritageChhatrapati Sambhajinagar

Twelve Buddhist caves in two groups on the hill directly behind Bibi ka Maqbara, largely sixth and seventh century, with unusually elaborate Tantric-phase sculpture. Almost empty of visitors, ten minutes from a monument that is not.

PanchakkiHeritageChhatrapati Sambhajinagar

A seventeenth-century water mill at the dargah of Baba Shah Musafir, driven by water brought several kilometres from a hill spring through an underground earthen conduit and dropped down a shaft to turn the wheel. It ground grain for the pilgrims. The engineering is the exhibit.

Grishneshwar TemplePilgrimageChhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Verul)

The twelfth of the jyotirlingas, a kilometre from the Ellora escarpment, in red basalt with dense figure carving. The present structure was rebuilt in the eighteenth century by Ahilyabai Holkar, who rebuilt a great many temples across India in the same decades.

PaithanHeritageChhatrapati Sambhajinagar

Pratishthana, the Satavahana capital, on the left bank of the Godavari — a town that was trading with the Roman world and is named in the Periplus. It is also the samadhi town of Sant Eknath, the home of the Paithani, and the site of the Jayakwadi dam, whose Nathsagar reservoir is the region's water supply and its bird lake.

Best time: November–February.

Takht Sachkhand Sri Hazur SahibPilgrimageNanded

One of the five takhts of Sikhism, on the Godavari bank where Guru Gobind Singh died in 1708 after installing the Guru Granth Sahib as the perpetual Guru. The gurdwara has sustained a Punjabi-speaking community in a Marathi city for three centuries, with its own Nanded-specific maryada.

Tuljapur Bhavani TemplePilgrimageDharashiv (Osmanabad)

The Bhavani temple on the Balaghat slope, one of the three and a half principal Shakti seats of Marathi country, and the family deity of a very large number of households. The image is a chala murti — it is physically moved and put to rest on fixed days, which is unusual for a shrine of this size.

Best time: Navratri, if crowds are acceptable; otherwise November–February.

Mahur (Mahurgad)PilgrimageNanded

The Renuka Devi hill shrine, another of the three and a half Shakti seats, and by tradition the birthplace of Dattatreya. Three separate hills carry three shrines; the pilgrimage does all of them.

Aundha NagnathPilgrimageHingoli

A jyotirlinga in a Hemadpanti-style temple on a plinth carved with a continuous frieze, the sanctum below the courtyard level. Rebuilt over an older structure; the plinth sculpture is the older work.

Parli VaijnathPilgrimageBeed

A jyotirlinga on a hill at Parli, on a raised stone platform reached by a long flight of steps. With Grishneshwar and Aundha, it gives this one region three of the twelve — more than any comparable area in India.

AmbajogaiHeritageBeed

The Yogeshwari temple town, and a literary site — Mukundraj, traditionally named as the first poet to write in Marathi, and Dasopant are both commemorated here. The Kholeshwar and Hattikhana rock-cut work on the town's edge is early and largely unvisited.

Ter (Tagara)HeritageDharashiv

A Satavahana-period trading town excavated for terracotta, ivory and Roman contact material, with a brick structure widely read as a converted apsidal chaitya. Also the village of Goroba the potter, whose abhangs the Varkari tradition still sings.

Naldurg FortHeritageDharashiv

A basalt fort on a spur, with a dam thrown across the Bori river inside the defences and a chamber built into the dam wall. When the river runs high the overflow falls on both sides of the chamber at once, which is the reason it exists — a pleasure pavilion inside a piece of hydraulic engineering.

Best time: August–September, when there is water to see.

KillariHeritageLatur

The epicentral village of the earthquake of 30 September 1993, roughly magnitude 6.2, which killed close to ten thousand people in the small hours. It struck a stable continental interior that hazard maps had treated as effectively aseismic, and it is studied worldwide for exactly that reason.

Nathsagar and the Jayakwadi bird sanctuaryNatureChhatrapati Sambhajinagar

The reservoir behind one of India's largest earthen dams, completed in the 1970s, which supplies the region's irrigation and its drinking water and fills with flamingo, pelican and migratory duck from November.

Best time: December–February.

Kandhar FortHeritageNanded

A Rashtrakuta-period fort on the plain, surrounded by a wet moat rather than built on a hill — an unusual plan for the Deccan, and evidence of what the water table used to be here.

Gangakhed and NarsiPilgrimageParbhani and Hingoli

Gangakhed on the Godavari is associated with Janabai, the servant-poet whose abhangs are among the most direct in Marathi; Narsi in Hingoli is held by tradition to be Namdev's birthplace. Two of the Varkari canon's central voices come from within forty kilometres of each other.