Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is the guardian of the Dravidian civilisation's deepest architectural tradition — temples in continuous use for two thousand years, a classical music tradition that has never required revival, and a culinary heritage that has been shaping the diet of Southeast Asia for a millennium.

The gopurams of Tamil Nadu's great temples are the most concentrated assertion in world architecture that a gateway can be a complete work of art: at Madurai, they rise 52 metres encrusted with thousands of stucco figures; at Srirangam, eighteen nested gopurams mark the boundaries of successive enclosures around the innermost shrine; at Chidambaram, the gold-covered roof of the Shiva temple in the form of the dancing Nataraja has been maintained by a hereditary community of Dikshitar priests who have been performing the rituals of this specific temple since it was first built.

The food of Tamil Nadu is the most structurally sophisticated of the South Indian regional cuisines: the thali as served in the traditional style on a banana leaf at a Brahmin restaurant in Kumbakonam — the specific combinations of rice and rasam and sambar and the twelve separate preparations of vegetables and the sweet pongal at the end — is not a meal so much as a nutrition system derived from Ayurvedic principles that has been refined over centuries.

Places to Visit in Tamil Nadu

• Meenakshi Temple, Madurai
• Shore Temple, Mahabalipuram
• Brihadeeswarar Temple, Thanjavur
• Marina Beach, Chennai

Things to Do in Tamil Nadu

• Temple architecture circuit
• Classical Bharatanatyam performance
• South Indian temple cuisine trail