Hampi

Hampi is the ruined capital of the Vijayanagara Empire — once among the world's wealthiest and most populous cities — spread across a landscape of enormous granite boulders and red earth that looks less like the setting for a civilisation than the aftermath of one.

The Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes, who visited Vijayanagara in 1520, wrote that it was 'the best-provided city in the world' and that its market was better stocked with provisions than Rome. Twenty-six years later, in 1565, the Deccan Sultanates sacked it after the Battle of Talikota, and the city that had housed half a million people was abandoned in a single year. What remains is spread across 26 square kilometres of a landscape so strange it looks designed: the boulders are the remnants of granite intrusions from 2.5 billion years ago, rounded by weathering, and the Vijayanagara builders worked with them rather than moving them.

The Vittala temple complex — the finest temple group in Hampi, with its famous stone chariot and its pillars that ring like bells — was being completed when the city was abandoned, and some of the carving shows the marks of unfinished work. The elephant stables that housed the war elephants in eleven identical chambers, the Lotus Mahal that possibly served as a council chamber for the queens — the ruins are specific enough in their remaining details to allow a reasonably precise picture of how a 16th-century Indian imperial city actually functioned.

Places to Visit in Hampi

• Virupaksha Temple
• Stone Chariot, Vittala Temple
• Matanga Hill
• Hampi Bazaar

Things to Do in Hampi

• Sunrise at Matanga Hill
• Boulder ruins cycling tour
• Vittala Temple stone chariot visit