Places
Kanyakumari point and the Bhagavathy Amman templePilgrimageKanyakumari
The southern tip of the peninsula, where the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean are conventionally said to meet, and a shore temple to the goddess as an unmarried girl. It is one of the few places in India where sunrise and sunset are both watched from the same stretch of rock, and around the April full moon sunset and moonrise can be seen at once.
Best time: October–March; Chitra Pournami in April for the moonrise.
Vivekananda Rock MemorialHeritageKanyakumari
A memorial on a rock about 500 m offshore, inaugurated in 1970 after a long campaign led by Eknath Ranade, marking the tradition that Vivekananda meditated there in 1892 before leaving for Chicago. The same rock carries the Sripada Mandapam over what is venerated as the goddess's footprint.
Getting there: Ferry from the Kanyakumari jetty; the crossing closes in rough weather.
Thiruvalluvar StatueHeritageKanyakumari
A stone figure of the Tirukkural's author on the adjacent rock, unveiled on 1 January 2000 and designed by V. Ganapati Sthapati. It stands 133 feet including its base, for the 133 chapters of the text, with the 38-foot pedestal standing for the chapters on virtue — a monument whose dimensions are a citation.
Gandhi MandapamHeritageKanyakumari
Built where Gandhi's ashes were kept before immersion, in a form drawing on Odisha temple architecture, and designed so that on 2 October the sun falls through an opening in the roof onto the memorial stone.
Padmanabhapuram PalaceHeritageKanyakumari (Thuckalay)
Travancore's capital until 1795 and the largest surviving wooden palace complex in the subcontinent — the Thai Kottaram dating from before 1550, the Uppirikka Malika of 1745 with the treasury and mural chamber above, a clock tower with a working three-hundred-year-old movement, and a medicinal bed assembled from sixty-four timbers. It stands in Tamil Nadu and is owned and maintained by the Government of Kerala, which is this region's whole argument in one building.
Best time: Any time; closed Mondays. Getting there: About 20 km from Nagercoil on the Thiruvananthapuram road.
Thanumalayan Temple, SuchindramPilgrimageKanyakumari
A temple to Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma as a single presence — Sthanu, Mal and Ayan, which is where the name comes from — with a tall gopuram, granite pillars cut so that they ring at different pitches when struck, and a large monolithic Hanuman. It was administered from Travancore and its architecture and ritual read as Kerala while its inscriptions and setting are Tamil.
Nagaraja Temple, NagercoilPilgrimageKanyakumari
The serpent shrine that gives the town its name, with a sand floor rather than a paved one and figures identified as Mahavira and Parshvanatha on its pillars — the Jain layer of the region surviving inside a functioning Hindu temple.
Chitharal Malai KovilHeritageKanyakumari
Jain rock-cut reliefs and a rock-shelter shrine on Thirucharanathumalai, dating to around the ninth century and later converted to a Bhagavathy temple. Protected by the Archaeological Survey, and the clearest evidence that this hill country was Jain before it was anything else.
Best time: Early morning; the climb is short but exposed.
Mathur aqueductHeritageKanyakumari
A concrete trough carrying an irrigation canal across the Pahrali river valley on piers, built in 1966, about 1,250 feet long with its tallest piers around 115 feet. It is walkable along the top, and it is the most direct illustration of how the Nanjil plain is watered.
Vattakottai fortHeritageKanyakumari
A compact granite sea fort north-east of Kanyakumari, built during the Travancore military reorganisation of the eighteenth century, with the sea on one side and the paddy plain on the other from the ramparts.
Udayagiri fortHeritageKanyakumari
The hill fort where Eustachius De Lannoy — the Dutch commander defeated at Colachel in 1741 — was first held and where he is buried, after three decades spent rebuilding the Travancore army. Locally still called Dillanai kotta.
ColachelHeritageKanyakumari
A working fishing harbour, and the site of the battle of 10 August 1741 in which Travancore defeated a Dutch East India Company force — among the very few clear defeats of a European naval power by an Indian state in that century.
Pechiparai and Perunchani reservoirsNatureKanyakumari
The two impoundments on the Kodayar system that irrigate the Nanjil plain. Pechiparai was completed in 1906 under Travancore, and the canal network below it is why this district grows wet paddy at all.
Best time: After the northeast monsoon, when they are full.
Muttom and ManakudyBeachKanyakumari
A rock-shelf beach and lighthouse at Muttom on the west-facing coast, and at Manakudy the estuary where the Pazhayar meets the sea behind a bar — a bird site, a crab fishery and a sandbar that shifts every monsoon.
Aralvaimozhi gap and the Muppandal wind farmsNatureKanyakumari
The break in the Western Ghats through which the southwest monsoon wind crosses to the eastern plain, now filled with one of the largest concentrations of onshore wind turbines in India. The geography that made this a trade and invasion route is the same geography that made it a power belt.
Thovalai flower marketUrbanKanyakumari
A wholesale flower market working from before dawn, supplying jasmine, chrysanthemum and garland material to temples and weddings on both sides of the Ghats. The trading is done in the dark because the flowers have to reach the buyer before the day warms.
Best time: Between four and seven in the morning.