Places

Tirumala Venkateswara TemplePilgrimageTirupati

A hill shrine on the Seshachalam range, reached by two one-way ghat roads or on foot up the Alipiri steps, and one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the world — daily footfall is normally counted in tens of thousands and rises sharply at Brahmotsavam and Vaikunta Ekadasi. The sanctum's Ananda Nilayam vimana is gold-plated; darshan is queued through a timed-token system; head-tonsure is offered by a large proportion of pilgrims; and the temple's kitchen produces the GI-registered laddu. Annamacharya's copper plates were found in a chamber here.

Best time: December–February, avoiding Brahmotsavam and the summer holidays. Getting there: Tirupati is the rail and air base; buses and shared cars run up the 22 km ghat road to Tirumala.

Sri KalahastiPilgrimageTirupati

A Shiva temple on the Swarnamukhi below the Seshachalam scarp, one of the Pancha Bhoota Sthalams — the five shrines associated with the elements, this one with air, marked by a lamp in the sanctum that flickers with no draught to explain it. Best known outside the pilgrimage circuit for Rahu-Ketu ritual and for the kalamkari workshops in the town.

LepakshiHeritageSri Sathya Sai

A Veerabhadra temple of the 1530s on a low granite outcrop, with the largest surviving body of Vijayanagara mural painting on its ceilings, an unfinished kalyana mandapa left mid-carving, a monolithic Nandi about 4.5 m tall a short distance away, and the hanging pillar — one of about seventy pillars that does not rest on the floor, under which a sheet of paper passes.

Best time: November–February, late morning for the ceilings.

PenukondaHeritageSri Sathya Sai

Vijayanagara's capital after the defeat at Talikota in 1565 and the seat from which the empire's rump was governed for decades. A hill fort, the Gagan Mahal palace in an Indo-Islamic idiom, Jain and Hindu temples, and the Babayya dargah, which draws Hindu and Muslim pilgrims together.

GandikotaNatureKadapa

A gorge where the Penna cuts through the Erramala quartzite, with a fifteenth-century fort of the Pemmasani Nayakas on the rim — a granary, a mosque, the Madhavaraya and Ranganatha temples and a step-well inside the walls. It is heavily marketed as a canyon; what is genuinely remarkable is the fort sitting on the lip of it.

Best time: November–February; the gorge is unbearable from March.

Belum CavesNatureNandyal

A limestone cave system with roughly 3.2 km of mapped passage, the longest in the Indian plains, formed by an underground stream that still runs in the deepest chamber. About a kilometre and a half is lit and open. Ventilation is poor and the deep sections are hot.

SrisailamPilgrimageNandyal

Mallikarjuna on the Krishna in the Nallamala forest — one of the twelve jyotirlingas and, with the Bhramaramba shrine, also a Shakti Peetha, which is an unusual double. The temple's outer walls carry Vijayanagara-period narrative relief. It sits inside the Nagarjunasagar–Srisailam Tiger Reserve, the largest tiger reserve in India by area, and the Chenchu communities of the forest have a recognised ritual role here.

Best time: November–February.

AhobilamPilgrimageNandyal

Nine Narasimha shrines scattered through a Nallamala valley — Lower Ahobilam is roadside, Upper Ahobilam is a climb, and the remaining shrines are forest walks of varying difficulty. The site is where Narasimha is held to have emerged from the pillar, and Chenchu Lakshmi, a Chenchu woman, is his consort in the local telling, which the ritual acknowledges.

MahanandiPilgrimageNandyal

A Shiva temple whose three tanks are fed by perennial springs rising in the temple floor, running at an almost constant volume and temperature year-round and clear enough to read the bottom. In this region a spring that never fails is itself the reason for a shrine. It is the central one of the Nava Nandi circuit.

YagantiPilgrimageKurnool

An Uma Maheswara temple set against a rock face with a perennial spring feeding its tank through a carved Nandi mouth, and caves in the hill behind. The monolithic Nandi is locally said to be growing; the explanation usually offered is the expansion of the silica-rich stone it is cut from.

PuttaparthiPilgrimageSri Sathya Sai

A village on the Chitravati that became an international pilgrimage destination in the twentieth century around Sathya Sai Baba, with an ashram, a university, a specialty hospital, a stadium, a planetarium and its own airport — an unusually complete institutional landscape in one of the driest districts in the country.

Horsley HillsHillAnnamayya

A small hill station at about 1,265 m above Madanapalle, known locally as Yenugu Mallamma Konda, with eucalyptus and gulmohar plantations and a temperature ten degrees below the plain below it. It was developed as a hot-weather retreat by the district administration in the nineteenth century.

Best time: October–February.

TadipatriHeritageAnantapur

Two Vijayanagara-period temples — Bugga Ramalingeswara, whose gopuram carries some of the densest relief carving in the region and whose spring rises inside the sanctum, and Chintala Venkataramana with its stone chariot. Both are far less visited than their carving deserves.

Gooty and Rayadurg fortsHeritageAnantapur

Hill forts on granite inselbergs rising abruptly from the plain, held successively by Vijayanagara, the Bijapur sultanate, the Marathas, Hyder Ali and the Company. The climbs are steep, unshaded and unfenced.

Rollapadu Wildlife SanctuaryWildlifeKurnool

Short grassland maintained specifically for the great Indian bustard, one of the last places the bird was regularly seen. It also holds lesser florican, blackbuck and wolf. The habitat is grassland, which India protects badly because it is classed as wasteland.

Best time: November–February.

Ontimitta Kodandarama TempleHeritageKadapa

A large Vijayanagara-period temple with a three-shrine sanctum in which Rama, Sita and Lakshmana are carved from a single block. Its Ramanavami kalyanam is a major regional occasion, and the poet Annamacharya and the English scholar C. P. Brown are both associated with the town.

Ameen Peer Dargah, KadapaPilgrimageKadapa

A Sufi shrine in the middle of Kadapa city, visited by Hindus and Muslims in roughly equal numbers, with a continuous annual urs. Shrines of this kind are the ordinary religious geography of the region rather than an exception to it.

TalakonaNatureTirupati

The highest waterfall in the region, in Seshachalam forest inside the biosphere reserve, reached by a walk through dense red-sanders country. It runs from the north-east monsoon rather than the south-west, so it is best in November and December.

Best time: November–January.

Orvakal and the Kurnool rock countryNatureKurnool

Erosional rock formations in Erramala quartzite, and the Konda Reddy Buruju watchtower in Kurnool town — the surviving fragment of the Vijayanagara-period fort in what was briefly the state's capital between 1953 and 1956.