The tower at Madurai

The Meenakshi temple in Madurai, late afternoon.

The city did not build a temple. It grew up around one.

A tower of painted figures

Madurai’s towers are gopurams, the gateway towers of a South Indian temple. The Meenakshi temple has fourteen of them, and the tallest, on the south side, rises about fifty metres over the shops. From a distance they look like coloured hills. Closer, every tier turns into figures: gods, guardians, animals and dancers, thousands of them, painted pink, blue and green and repainted every few decades. The temple belongs to Meenakshi, a form of the goddess Parvati, and to Sundareswarar, a form of Shiva, her husband.

A temple that is also a neighbourhood

Inside, the temple is busy in an ordinary way. Families sit on the steps of the Golden Lotus Tank, a stone pool at the centre of the complex. Flower sellers thread jasmine at the gates. People come before work, after school, on the way home. Each night the image of Sundareswarar is carried in a small procession to Meenakshi’s chamber, and the temple closes around that. Madurai is called the city that never sleeps, and the streets around its walls stay open late.

Why people travel for it

Madurai is one of the oldest cities in South India, a capital of the Pandya kings more than two thousand years ago and a centre of early Tamil poetry. The temple most people see today was largely rebuilt by the Nayak rulers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pilgrims come from across Tamil Nadu and beyond, and the biggest crowds arrive in April or May for Chithirai, the festival that re-enacts the wedding of Meenakshi and Sundareswarar. Visitors from abroad come for the towers and stay for the Hall of a Thousand Pillars.

Getting to the gates

Madurai’s airport has flights from Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad, and a few from abroad. Trains from Chennai take about seven to eight hours. The temple is in the centre of the old city, a short auto ride from the railway station, with a gate on each of its four sides. Phones and cameras are not allowed inside and are left at counters near the gates. Some inner shrines are open to Hindus only.

At the temple

• Come around four, when the towers take the side light, and stay into the evening.
• Walk once around the outer streets before you go in. The towers make more sense from there.
• Cover shoulders and knees. Shoes are left at the gate.
• For a photo of the towers, some shops nearby let you up on their roof. Expect to be shown something to buy on the way down.

Leave after dark. The towers are lit, and the city is still awake around them.