The Most Beautiful Temples in India
14 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful temples in India are Konark Sun Temple, Harmandir Sahib and Lotus Temple. The list covers 14 temples. Last updated 13 October 2026.
India has been building temples in stone for some fifteen centuries, and over that time it produced not one style but several. In the north the Nagara temple gathers into a curving tower above the sanctum; in the south the Dravida temple rises in a stepped pyramid and later spreads into walled cities entered through towering gopurams. Alongside Hindu shrines stand Buddhist, Jain and Sikh ones, and nearly every surface became a place for sculpture: gods, dancers, animals and whole epics cut into stone.
On the east coast, the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha was built in the thirteenth century as the chariot of the sun god Surya, its base carved with great stone wheels. The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya marks the place where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. In Gujarat the Modhera Sun Temple descends to a stepped tank, and in Rajasthan the Jain temple at Ranakpur fills its marble halls with a forest of carved pillars.
The south is represented by the gopurams of the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai, the vast island temple of Ranganathaswamy at Srirangam, and the finely carved Hoysala temple of Chennakeshava at Belur. The Khajuraho group in central India is famous for its dense sculpture, and the Ramappa Temple in Telangana for its Kakatiya carving. Two very different modern landmarks complete the picture: the gilded Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, heart of the Sikh faith, and the Lotus Temple in Delhi.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Konark Sun Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 2 | Harmandir Sahib | Temple | |
| 3 | Lotus Temple | Temple | |
| 4 | Mahabodhi Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 5 | Modhera Sun Temple | Temple | |
| 6 | Meenakshi Temple | Temple | |
| 7 | Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur | Temple | ✓ |
| 8 | Chennakeshava Temple, Belur | Temple | |
| 9 | Khajuraho Group of Monuments | Temple | ✓ |
| 10 | Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam | Temple | |
| 11 | Ranakpur Jain Temple | Temple | |
| 12 | Ramappa Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 13 | Ramanathaswamy Temple | Temple | |
| 14 | Dilwara Temple | Temple |
01 Konark Sun Temple
India · 21.7 km from Puri19.887° N 86.095° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Souravdas1987 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Much of the temple's sculpture was taken away over the centuries: the Aruna pillar that stood before the entrance now stands at the Jagannath temple in Puri, and pieces went to the Indian Museum in Kolkata and the British Museum. Fallen sculpture from the site is displayed in the Konark Archaeological Museum, run by the Archaeological Survey of India. The temple appears on the Indian ten-rupee note, and each year pilgrims gather nearby for the Chandrabhaga Mela, around February.
Did you know? The seven stone horses carry the names of seven metres of Sanskrit verse, among them Gayatri, Jagati and Trishtubh.
02 Harmandir Sahib
India · 2.6 km from Amritsar31.620° N 74.877° E
This picture has been taken by Oleg Yunakov . Contact e-mail: yunakov gmail.com . Image can be used in accordance with the terms of the СС-BY-SA license. Other photos can be seen here . · CC BY-SA 3.0 What makes a visit unforgettable is that the shrine is fully alive. Hymns are sung almost around the clock; at dawn the scripture is carried in a flower-decked palanquin from the Akal Takht across the causeway, and at night it is carried back to rest. On the east side the community kitchen, the langar, serves a free vegetarian meal to anyone who comes, prepared and served by volunteers to diners seated in long rows on the floor; well over 100,000 meals are served on a busy day, and more than 150,000 people visit daily. On the way out of the sanctum, volunteers hand out karah prasad, a sweet offering, and a museum of Sikh history sits above the northern clock-tower entrance.
Did you know? While Guru Arjan's first shrine was being built from 1581, the pool was kept empty and dry, and it was only filled once the building was inaugurated.
03 Lotus Temple
India · 7.7 km from New Delhi28.553° N 77.259° E
Image by harmeet9000 from Pixabay Since its 1986 opening, the building has drawn more than 70 million visitors, at various points reportedly outpacing the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal in annual footfall — an unusual outcome for a building with no clergy, no fixed liturgy, and no sermons. Anyone of any faith or none is free to sit inside in silence, and readings are drawn from the scriptures of multiple world religions rather than one, which is less a design footnote than the entire point of the building.
Did you know? Indian cement could not match the colour required, so white cement was imported from South Korea and mixed with Alwar dolomite and Jaipur sand.
04 Mahabodhi Temple
India · 11.5 km from Gaya24.696° N 84.991° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Sumitsurai · CC BY-SA 4.0 UNESCO inscribed the temple complex in 2002. In 2013 a Thai-funded project gilded the upper part of the tower.
Did you know? In 1033 a Chinese monk named Huaiwen left an inscription at the temple on behalf of the Song emperor Zhenzong.
05 Modhera Sun Temple
India23.584° N 72.133° E
Nandicmb · CC BY-SA 4.0 The design is tied to the sky. The temple sits close to the Tropic of Cancer and is oriented so that at the equinoxes the first light of the rising sun travels through the halls into the sanctum, where it once struck the image of the god; at the summer solstice the noon sun stands almost directly overhead. The style is the Maru-Gurjara manner of western India, here at its most refined, with perforated stone screens and a crowd of small figures that rewards slow looking. Every January, after the kite festival of Uttarayan, the temple becomes the backdrop to a three-day festival of classical dance, a tradition revived in 1992.
Did you know? Several figures on the walls wear West Asian dress, with belts and boots, a detail read as a sign of Persian influence.
06 Meenakshi Temple
India · 0.3 km from Madurai9.920° N 78.119° E
Image by prasanna_devadas from Pixabay The fourteen gopurams are covered floor to ceiling in painted stucco figures — deities, guardians, mythical beasts — and unlike most historic monuments, that paint isn't preserved as a fixed artefact. It's ritually redone roughly every twelve years in a renewal ceremony called kumbhabhishekam, meaning the temple's exterior is intentionally kept looking freshly made rather than allowed to weather, an act of continuous devotion rather than conservation.
Did you know? The tallest of the temple's gateway towers is the southern gopuram, about 52 metres high and built in the late 16th century.
07 Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur
India · 2.4 km from Thanjavur10.783° N 79.132° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 This is a living temple, not a museum. It belongs to the UNESCO site of the Great Living Chola Temples, alongside the later Chola temples at Gangaikonda Cholapuram and the Airavatesvara temple, but worship continues daily, and every February, around Mahashivratri, the Brahan Natyanjali festival brings classical dancers to perform in the courtyard over ten days.
Did you know? The finial crowning the tower, about 3.8 metres high, was originally sheathed in gold.
08 Chennakeshava Temple, Belur
India13.163° N 75.861° E
Dineshkannambadi ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Inside, the mood changes to dim, polished intimacy. The hall is carried on pillars, many of them turned on a lathe so that their rings and bells gleam like metal; the most celebrated are the intricately carved Narasimha pillar and the Mohini pillar. More than a hundred inscriptions have been found in the temple, and several of the sculptors signed their work, among them Ruvari Mallitamma, who left his name on more than forty pieces. The whole complex stands in a walled courtyard with smaller shrines, a stepped tank and an entrance gateway tower.
Did you know? The hall was first open to the air; stone screens added in the 14th century for security darkened it, and ten carry carved scenes, including a Hoysala royal court.
09 Khajuraho Group of Monuments
India24.850° N 79.933° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Hiroki Ogawa · CC BY 3.0 Khajuraho declined after the Delhi Sultanate seized the Chandela kingdom in the 13th century; the traveller Ibn Battuta, in the 1330s, found mutilated idols and long-haired yogis living among the temples. Forest crept over the site, and it reached a wider audience only in the 1830s, when local people led the British surveyor T. S. Burt to the ruins. The name comes from the Sanskrit for date palm. Each February the Khajuraho Dance Festival stages classical Indian dance with the Chitragupta or Vishvanatha temples as a backdrop.
Did you know? Many inscriptions on the temple walls are poems with double meanings, a play that the structure of Sanskrit makes possible.
10 Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam
India · 6.8 km from Trichy10.862° N 78.690° E
Ssriram mt · CC BY-SA 4.0 The outer two enclosures are lived-in streets of houses, shops and flower stalls; the inner five hold the shrines, halls and tanks. The sanctum carries a gilded vimana shaped like the sacred syllable om. Among the halls, the granite Thousand-Pillar Mandapa dates from the Vijayanagara period, while the Nayak-era Sesharaya Mandapa is known for its monolithic piers carved as rearing horses with riders. The Rajagopuram itself had stood unfinished since around 1500; its upper tiers were completed only in 1987, with support from the Ahobila Matha.
Did you know? The main image of Ranganatha is about six metres long, reclining on a five-hooded serpent coiled three and a half times.
11 Ranakpur Jain Temple
India25.135° N 73.447° E
Image by Glavo from Pixabay The pleasure of the place is in moving slowly. Light falls from open courts onto the pale marble and shifts across the columns through the day, and every ceiling repays a look upwards, carved into dense ornament that turns the stone almost to lace. Look for the relief of Parshvanatha, cut from a single slab of marble, where the Tirthankara sits sheltered by a serpent with a thousand and eight heads while the serpents' tails knot around him. Nearby stand smaller Jain temples, including one dedicated to Parshvanatha, and about 300 metres from the main temple a Sun temple.
Did you know? A single slab of marble was carved into an image of Parshvanatha sheltered by 1,008 snake heads, with serpent tails so entwined that no end can be traced.
12 Ramappa Temple
India18.259° N 79.942° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Ms Sarah Welch · CC0 Around the main temple stand a Nandi pavilion with its carved bull, subsidiary shrines and a pillar bearing a 201-line inscription recording Recherla Rudra's works. The temple is cared for by the Archaeological Survey of India, and Ramappa Lake lies close by.
Did you know? Its roughly 600 dance figures range in size from about 15 centimetres to nearly two metres tall.
13 Ramanathaswamy Temple
India9.288° N 79.317° E
Ssriram mt · CC BY-SA 4.0 Above the walls rise the gopurams, the tallest of them about 53 metres high. Within the precinct lie twenty-two theerthams, holy wells and tanks that tradition links to Rama's arrows, and pilgrims move from one to the next, being doused with buckets of water at each, before going in for darshan. The first of the sacred waters lies outside the walls: Agni Theertham, on the shore of the Bay of Bengal, where many pilgrims begin by wading into the shallow sea.
Did you know? Where the third corridor meets the path from the western gopuram, the floor is laid out like a chessboard, a space known as the Chokkattan Mandapam.
14 Dilwara Temple
India24.609° N 72.723° E
Malaiya at en.wikipedia · GFDL The temples were damaged in 1311 during Alauddin Khilji's campaigns and repaired within a decade, and they were restored again in 1906 and between 1950 and 1965, which is why older marble now shows a warm yellow patina beside newer, whiter stone. A well-known story holds that the carvers were paid in gold by the weight of the marble dust they scraped away, an image that captures how patiently the stone was thinned. Mount Abu itself, at about 1,220 metres, is Rajasthan's only hill station, a plateau in the Aravalli Range long used as a cool retreat and dotted with Hindu and Jain shrines and the lake of Nakki.
Did you know? Luna Vasahi has two niches nicknamed Derani and Jethani, honouring the wives of the two minister brothers who built it.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful temples in India?
- On our list, Konark Sun Temple ranks first, followed by Harmandir Sahib and Lotus Temple.
- What is the difference between Nagara and Dravida temples?
- Nagara temples of northern India crown the sanctum with a curved tower called a shikhara. Dravida temples of the south use a stepped, pyramid-like tower (vimana) and often large gateway towers called gopurams.
- Why is the Konark temple called the Sun Temple?
- It is dedicated to Surya, the Hindu sun god, and was designed as his colossal chariot, with carved stone wheels along its platform and sculpted horses pulling it.
- What is the Golden Temple in Amritsar?
- Harmandir Sahib, known as the Golden Temple, is the holiest gurdwara of Sikhism. Its gilded sanctum stands in the middle of a sacred pool and is open to visitors of every faith.
- How many temples are on this list in India?
- The list covers 14 temples.