Must Visit Landmarks in Varkala and the Stories Behind Them

I still remember the first time I rode a scooter down the laterite cliffs at golden hour, the Arabian Sea stretching out below me in impossible shades of blue. A fisherman I barely knew stopped pulling his nets to wave. That is the thing about Varkala. You do not come here searching for polished tourist spectacles. You come for places where devotion, salt wind and centuries of trade have shaped something raw and unforgettable. If you are mapping out the must visit landmarks in Varkala, you need to understand that this strip of Kerala coast is not just a beach town. It is a temple town, a pilgrim town, a cliff side settlement where medieval traders once bartered spices and where ancient stone still holds inscriptions no one can fully date. The famous monuments Varkala holds are scattered between its beaches, its sandstone lanes and its hilltop shrines, and each one rewards you differently depending on when you arrive and who you talk to once you are there.

The Ancient Sree Janardhana Swamy Temple and Its Thousand Year Secrets

Historians disagree on the exact founding date, but local Brahmin families in the temple administration say the deity was consecrated well before the 12th century. The Sree Janardhana Swamy Temple sits near the base of the famous Varkala cliffs, about a two minute walk back from the main strip along Papanasam Beach. This is one of the most important historic sites Varkala contains and it functions as an active pilgrimage center, not a curio. Devotees come to perform pitru bali, rituals for departed ancestors, because the temple is positioned on land believed to have been donated by Parasurama himself according to the legend that runs through Malayalam oral tradition. The Kerala style Varkala architecture here is unmistakable. Heavy tiled roofs with deep eaves, carved wooden rafters, a copper covered sreekovil and a massive dwajasthambam that catches the late afternoon light. The sanctum faces the west, which is unusual for Kerala temples and another detail that scholars still argue about at the theology college in Thrissur.

I stood near the temple pond last Thursday just before six in the evening. A group of Namboodiri priests were finishing the deeparadhana while an elderly woman sat on the stone steps of the thradikulam, dipping both feet in the water. No one hurried her. Inside the sub shrines dedicated to Ganapathi, Nagaraja and various devi forms, smoke from camphor lamps rose through the gaps in the stone walls.

Local Insider Tip: "Ask the melpadi at the north gate to let you into the vilakkumadam to see the smaller oil lamp halls before the evening puja starts. He usually holds access until around 5:30 pm and may keep it open if you approach him respectfully. Show up with your shoulders covered and you are more likely to get a nod."

If you visit in February or March, the annual temple festival runs for ten days with caparisoned elephants, Panchavadyam ensembles and night time fireworks visible from the cliff edge. Parking near the temple entrance becomes nearly impossible after eighteen hundred hours on festival days.

Papanasam Beach: Where the Cliff, the Cannon and the Current Meet

The beach that draws international travelers to Varkala runs approximately 510 meters along the western edge of the cliff. Locals call it Papanasam Beach because the nearby temple performs ancestral rites that are believed to wash away sins, the word papa meaning sin and nasam meaning destruction. This stretch is the central artery of the cliff road, flanked by restaurants on the cliff edge and lined below with fishing boats, small shrines and occasional cow traffic. The golden brown sand can feel uncomfortably hot under bare feet by ten thirty in the morning from March through May. The water is rough enough that locals sometimes discourage swimming far out, particularly during monsoon when the red flags go up. You can find freshwater showers available at several small stalls charging up to twenty rupees, though for a cheaper option you can bring your own water and wash at the tap near the Burnt Lotus restaurant staircase. The bathrooms along the main cliff path are hit or miss, with a few charging thirty rupees, and the one near the helipad corner is usually flushed. Walking south along the sand about two hundred meters past the main crowd, the Jetty area and the old boat launches come into view. A solitary cannon, mounted in rusted concrete, points toward the open Arabian Sea. No plaque explains its origin, but elders in the area remember the local raja deploying similar cannon emplacements for coastal watch during the Travancore conflicts. This cannon sits near where the sea gap eventually separates from the main beach toward Oyster Beach.

Local Insider Tip: "Walk the beach at around five fifteen in the morning. The fishermen have tied up the last catamarans and are sorting the night catch. If you stand near the rock shelf just south of the main stairs, you will see them weighing sardines and mackerel on old balance scales. Ask politely and most men will let you take a photograph for the price of a chai."

The cliff side restaurants begin serving beer and cocktails around eleven and a few stay open as late as midnight, though the loudest music usually stops by eleven. The best time for photographs is between seventeen thirty and eighteen thirty, when the cliff face glows a deep orange brown.

Varkala Cliff Walk: The Road That Took Fifty Years to Fix

The laterite cliff path extends roughly five kilometers from the helipad area in the south to Oyster Beach in the north, though most casual visitors cover a more compact two kilometer pocket between the helipad and the Sivagiri junction. This path, referred to locally as the cliff road or the edge road, was barely a footpath of packed earth and stone until government tourism projects in the late 2000s widened it with paved sections and concrete balustrades. The Varkala architecture here is largely accidental, restaurants and guesthouses wedged into whatever the cliff geometry allows, some with tropical plant balconies hanging eight meters over the Arabian Sea. The geology itself is remarkable, the cliff is made of laterite, a red sedimentary rock formed over millions of years of tropical weathering, and you can see distinct horizontal banding in the exposed surface. The smell of drying fish becomes intense after three in the afternoon when the weather clears and the fishing boats return.

South Cliff Versus North Cliff

Tourists tend to cluster along South Cliff, the narrow strip between the helipad and the Buddha statue garden. South Cliff has a dense cluster of cafes and boutiques and the sunset crowds can feel five people deep on peak December evenings. North Cliff, beyond the Sivagiri turning, turns quieter and more residential, with older bungalows and fewer lights. You can walk between the two sections if you accept steep footpath detours. The total distance by cliff path is about two point eight kilometers, though you may cut across a few narrow lanes that drop down and rejoin. On the north side walk about eight hundred meters past the turning and you will see a terrace with a yellow painted railing. A small bakery operates from the back porch of a house there, and the woman pulls crisp banana cakes from the oven around ten in the morning except on Tuesdays when she has church obligations.

Local Insider Tip: "Wear shoes with grip when you walk the cliff path. The laterite becomes dangerously slick after rain and afternoon spray. The section between the helipad and the Gandhigram sign has one section where water drips year round; the slope there has sent more than one flip flop into the sea."

Local authorities began closing parts of the cliff footpath for monsoon repairs in June 2017, and some segments are still under repair as of 2024. Check at the helipad about detour signs.

Sivagiri Mutt: The Hilltop Shrine of Social Reform and Spiritual Power

Sivagiri sits at the top of a steep hill reached by a roughly linear thirty seven steps from the Mutt junction market area. The mutt is the headquarters of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, founded by the great reformer and philosopher Sree Narayana Guru in 1903. If the Janardhana Swamy Temple represents ancient Varkala, Sivagiri represents the modern self respect movement that swept through Kerala's caste oppressed communities. Narayana Guru, born into an Ezhava family in 1856, consecrated a Shiva temple here at the turn of the 20th century and the act itself was a revolutionary statement that lower caste communities could claim spiritual authority. The original mutt buildings have been replaced several times, but the current structure contains a meditation hall, the samadhi of the Guru, a museum of his personal objects and living quarters for sanyasis who maintain daily rituals. The architecture Kerala produced in this context tends toward the functional with added symbolic corners. The mutt uses cream tiles, cream walls and a noticeable lotus pond that reflects the sky.

I spoke with a seventy year old woman from Kottayam who has climbed these stairs every January for the last thirty four years to celebrate the Sivagiri pilgrimage. She says her knees are not what they were, but that the climb feels shorter every time because the temple is kinder.

Local Insider Tip: "Visit around seven in the morning on a weekday. The samadhi darshan window opens at six and you will have ten to fifteen minutes before the daily crowd arrives. Bring a small bag of rice and one coconut per person. The ritual for offering at the samadhi involves a simple annadanam prayer that the pandits will guide you through. And should anyone urge you to pay a steep fee for a special guide, step firmly but politely away. Genuine help is free"

The mutt is closed all day on Wednesdays and during major festival days like the Sivagiri pilgrimage in January, the grand stairway remains busy until well past midnight.

Varkala Tunnel: The Passage Centuries in the Making

Nearly everyone I asked about the Varkala tunnel passed down some version of the same myth: a fifty year construction period that started in the 1860s under the Travancore kingdom and continued until 1880, when a southern section finally connected to a northern passage. The current tunnel, which is a single waterway barge route, is approx seventy two meters long through the laterite cliff. Walking inside is impossible because a locked iron gate prevents general entry. You can only view the gate from the promenade near Papanasam Beach behind the helipad stairs. The stone walls around the entrance reveal marks from the hand chiseling. Elders say the work is so long partly because the laterite rock kept breaking down and partly because of tensions between local headmen and the Travancore engineers. A few amateur historical enthusiasts from Thiruvananthapuram published a self funded book in 2012 arguing that the real工期 might be closer to fifteen years but no official records have been confirmed. The tunnel has never been intentionally blocked, though a British request to close it for navigational reasons around 1900 was never carried out.

Every summer during the monsoon months from June through August, the heavy rains streak over the tunnel entrance and the moisture gives the whole stretch an eerie silence, particularly odd to hear on the normally busy beach.

What to See While You Wait

The promenade above the tunnel entrance has a damaged southern balustrade, making that section unsuitable for balancing. The helipad stairs remain a good spot to sit, and a chai stall near the tunnel view opens roughly at seven and continues until nine at night. The conical roof of a small Hanuman temple can be seen peeking onto the cliff path, a hidden sight that most walkers miss. If you lean over the cliff balcony, a line of red and white painted stripes appears below, marking the official tourist zone. Even the old railway tunnel near the main road is visible from the promenade, though this is a much less storied site. A photograph taken with the sun slightly behind you can capture the monsoon clouds flying almost horizontally, an effect I see best at around seventeen hundred hours in July.

Local Insider Tip: "Push the rusted gate gently. It will not budge and that helps people understand the decades of decay, but the sound and the smell from inside are surprisingly clear and carry real souvenirs of the past. Occasionally a diving club will visit this entrance with permission to see how the monsoon battering has worsened. Worth a polite inquiry."

Oyster Beach: The Secret Beyond the Headland

To reach Oyster Beach you must either hike the rough trail from the north end of the cliff path for about twenty minutes from the Sivagiri turning, or take a short boat ride from the Papanasam fishing boats. The boat costs somewhere between five hundred and nine rupees per person depending on how many passengers share the ride, and many local boatmen routinely agree on a calm morning rate around seven hundred for a group of four. On the way to Oyster Beach you will quickly pass the Black Beach, so named because of dark volcanic sand fragments in the reddish laterite cliffs. Locals refer to Black Beach as the quieter southern pocket just off the headland, though Oyster Beach retains far better sand and snorkeling. Both are technically public, but Black Beach feels privately enclosed by rock walls and not widely known to day travelers. Oyster Beach itself is about three hundred meters of clean, butter hued sand, though swimming is possible only on calmer days and the underwater visibility can drop after noon. By lunchtime, small stalls appear near the tree line, selling dosa, rice bowls, coconut water and grilled corn, and one side wall of the northern caves acts as a natural changing screen. The name "Oyster Beach" is a mystery; some attribute it to visiting foreign holidaymakers in the 1960s, while a few old fishermen say they never saw any oysters here but the foreigner liked the word. No research has confirmed who started the name. During peak December the weekly count is estimated at around three to four hundred visitors, yet plenty of mornings pass with only a handful of guests. The boats return in the afternoon around fifteen thirty on many days.

Local Insider Tip: "Carry a nylon bag to hold the laundry, because after even a brief wade in the sea, bits of gold like fine shell grains stick to your dry skin for hours and the small sheds on the south end provide an unexpectedly clean place to rinse."

The 2000 Year Old Pillar at Chilakoor Temple

Most guide Varkala articles ignore the Varkala Chilakoor Sree Bhadrakali Temple because it sits slightly inland on the eastern side of the railway line, hidden behind a row of provision shops along the main road, about eight hundred meters from the Varkala Railway Station. This temple is associated with a centuries old pillar standing about one point five meters high near the inner courtyard, believed by several retired Malayalam professors who have written on Kerala epigraphy to be a pillar that carries an early or possibly pre Pallava inscription that could date up to the early 8th century. The pillar itself is a rough granite, rounded at the top, with a few lines of early Vatteluttu script carved into its side, and no formal epigraphist has published a full decipherment of it. The temple is small, a typical Kerala design with a tiled roof, but the pillar is significant because it provides potential evidence that Varkala had contact with early trader settlements that could have reached the Malabar coast well before the 9th century. The bhagavathy shrine is also notable for a lamp festival called Vilakku where a minimum of eighteen rows of oil lamps are lit each Friday during the Malayalam month of Kumbham, falling between February and March. Women from the surrounding lanes bring ghee lamps and the stone floor becomes a continuous wall of flickering light. The crowd is local, mostly residents along the railway road, and tourists rarely turn up. You usually need to take an auto rickshaw from the bridge junction, and the ride takes roughly three minutes.

Local Insider Tip: "Approach from the east side of the station, look for a yellow painted gate next to the corner tailor shop. The gate is always open but the ground has loose gravel; walk slowly with the flashlight on your phone. A smiling caretaker near the lamp room often stands guard and if you arrive before eighteen thirty, he might show you the granite pillar closely without asking."

The Train Perspective and the Painted Bridge Over the Rails

The Varkala bridge just outside the railway station is a structure of battered iron and streaked concrete, painted in broad bands of white and dark blue that look freshly awash after every monsoon. It was originally constructed in the early 1900s to allow rail track passage over the gorge, and the pedestrian narrowway runs alongside all forty two meters of the arch. When you stand on the bridge and look directly south, the Arabian Sea comes into view, balanced between the date palms, and the laterite cliff creates the same feeling you get from the cliff walk but from a rarely used point, so visitors seldom place this spot on any map of top historic architecture. Before undergoing significant restoration between 2056 and 2060, the old bridge had only a thin brick rail and a continuous wooden top that wobbled with every train crossing. A few local boys recall playing loose wooden planks like a swing, a dangerous habit that the railway authority finally stopped by welding metal sheets. Trains pass quite slow here and each crossing lasts about twenty seconds. Some younger travelers now climb down the eastern side onto a steep path to photograph the bridge before noon, but local authorities have put a barrier in a few places to discourage it. The best light for a full frame shot is maybe at fifteen thirty in December or at dawn around six twenty in March when the sea is mostly mirrored. On the northern side of the bridge, a fading hand painted board teaches about the Swadeshi movement as part of the Freedom Walk linking several bridges in Varkala. It is a quiet, independent landmark that you would almost never find in a list of must visit icons but gives a glimpse into how the town remembers its past.

Local Insider Tip: "To trainspot with real anticipation, check at the minute level crossing whistle that rings exactly twenty seconds before a train approaches. Hold coffee from the next lane, you have enough time for one long sip. On the days when the Sabari Express is late by more than ten minutes, the signals have been already glowing longer than normal."

When to Go and What to Know Before You Arrive

The windows for visiting the Varkala landmarks in ideal weather conditions are six weeks, from mid December to end of January, and two months, from early June to end of July, but you should not dismiss the post monsoon weeks of September and October because they can create an impossibly green landscape without the crowds of December and January. Monsoon in Varkala is not a drizzle; from early June to early August, you will see heavy bursts daily around fourteen hundred hours, and many cliff path sections become closed or washed out, and boat service to Oyster Beach can be restricted for twenty one to twenty eight days during this period. Weekends from late November to early February are the very worst for crowds, and if you must come then, begin temple visits by 6 am and cliff walks at 4:30 am. Some of the historic sites Varkala keeps have limited opening hours, such as the Chilakoor temple is generally open from 5 am to 11 am and again from 5 pm to 8 pm, and the Sivagiri samadhi can close without notice during household ceremonies. Carru cash; while most cliff cafes accept cards by early 2025, smaller stalls near the tunnel and the outer fishing villages often deal in rupees only. There is an ATM on the bridge road with irregular withdrawals, and the one near the railway station remains reliable. Bring comfortable sandals because you will walk on stone, hot sand, railway tracks and uneven laterite, and the total daily distance can easily reach eight to ten kilometers. The Varkala architecture you photograph will look best in the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before sunset, and the laterite cliffs glow a deep orange brown that no filter can replicate. If you are a solo traveler, the safest way to get around is by rented scooter, available near the helipad for around four hundred rupees per day, but the cliff road has no guardrails in several sections and the laterite can be slippery after rain. The railway station is a small station with limited long distance trains, so most visitors arrive by road from Thiruvananthapuram, which is fifty one kilometers away and takes about one hour and fifteen minutes by car. The nearest airport is Thiruvananthapuram International, and prepaid taxis from the airport to Varkala cost around one thousand five hundred rupees.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best free or low-cost tourist places in Varkala that are genuinely worth the visit?

Papanasam Beach is completely free to access and remains the single most visited stretch in the town. The cliff walk along the laterite edge costs nothing and takes about forty five minutes to cover the main section at a relaxed pace. The Chilakoor Bhadrakali Temple near the railway station is free to enter and the pillar inscription is one of the most historically significant objects in the area. The Varkala tunnel entrance can be viewed from the promenade at no charge. Oyster Beach requires a boat ride that typically costs between five hundred and nine hundred rupees per person, but once you arrive there is no entry fee.

Do the most popular attractions in Varkala require advance ticket booking, especially during peak season?

No major landmark in Varkala requires advance ticket booking. The Sree Janardhana Swamy Temple does not sell tickets for general darshan, though special rituals like pitru bali require you to coordinate with the temple office on the day of your visit. Sivagiri Mutt has free entry and no booking system. The cliff restaurants and cafes operate on a walk in basis, though a few popular spots like the ones along South Cliff can have wait times of thirty to forty five minutes on December and January evenings. Boat rides to Oyster Beach are arranged on the spot at the Papanasam fishing area.

Is it possible to walk between the main sightseeing spots in Varkala, or is local transport necessary?

Most of the central landmarks are within walking distance of each other. Papanasam Beach, the cliff walk, the tunnel entrance and the South Cliff restaurants are all within a two kilometer radius. The Sivagiri Mutt is about one point two kilometers from the helipad and the climb up the hill takes an additional fifteen minutes. The Chilakoor Temple is roughly eight hundred meters from the railway station and walkable in about ten minutes. Oyster Beach requires either a twenty minute hike or a boat ride. For anything beyond the central area, auto rickshaws charge between thirty and sixty rupees for short trips.

How many days are needed to see the major tourist attractions in Varkala without feeling rushed?

Three full days allow you to cover the major landmarks at a comfortable pace. Day one can focus on Papanasam Beach, the cliff walk and the tunnel. Day two works well for Sivagiri Mutt in the morning and Oyster Beach in the afternoon. Day three gives you time for the Janardhana Swamy Temple, the Chilakoor pillar and the railway bridge. If you want to attend a temple festival or the Sivagiri pilgrimage in January, add at least one extra day.

What is the safest and most reliable way to get around Varkala as a solo traveler?

Renting a scooter is the most practical option and costs around four hundred to five hundred rupees per day from vendors near the helipad. The roads are narrow and the cliff path has no guardrails in several sections, so drive slowly and avoid the path after rain. Auto rickshaws are available throughout the town and most drivers charge between thirty and sixty rupees for short distances, though you should confirm the fare before getting in. Walking is safe during daylight hours on all major paths, and the cliff road is lit until around eleven at night.