Discover India. Experience Tamil Nadu.

Older than most countries and busier than most cities, Madurai arranges itself in concentric squares around a temple that has been its centre of gravity for two thousand years.

An island reached by a bridge over open water, where a temple keeps the longest pillared corridor in the country and the sea lies flat as poured glass.

The last stone of the subcontinent, where three bodies of water meet and the sun can be watched rising and setting from the same square of rock.

Higher, quieter and mistier than its neighbours — a forest town built around a star-shaped lake, where the view arrives and departs on its own schedule.

A hill station in the Nilgiris where the temperature drops the moment you climb past the fourteenth hairpin and the landscape turns to clipped green terraces.

The Chola capital, where a temple finished around 1010 still stands square, and the bronzes cast under the same dynasty are among the finest ever made anywhere.

A seventh-century port town where the Pallavas cut temples, elephants and entire narrative panels straight out of the granite outcrops facing the Bay of Bengal.

A capital with one of the longest urban beaches in the world on one side and a temple quarter of astonishing age on the other, held together by coffee and music.

A former colony that kept its street grid, its mustard-yellow walls and its bougainvillea, and set them a few metres from a bazaar that owes them nothing.

A working city at the foot of the Western Ghats and the practical doorway to the Nilgiris — cotton mills, engineering yards, and a temple on a hill above all of it.

A small hill station in the Shevaroy range, wrapped in coffee, orange groves and silver oak — the least crowded of the southern hill towns, and the easiest to reach.

A cluster of villages on a plateau in the Vellore hills, reached by fourteen hairpins — paragliding, a boating lake, and almost nothing else to demand your attention.

A plateau of tea and coffee in the Anamalai hills, high above Pollachi, where the estate roads pass through genuine rainforest and the wildlife has right of way.

Where the Kaveri splits into channels and falls through a gorge of carbonatite rock, and round coracles carry you close enough to be soaked by it.

A run of waterfalls in the Western Ghats where the season reverses the usual advice — you come in the monsoon, precisely because the water is high.

A Mughal capital on the Yamuna holding the most photographed building on earth — which is, inconveniently for cynics, exactly as good as everyone says.

A planned eighteenth-century capital whose old quarter was painted pink for a visiting prince and never painted back, ringed by hill forts and stepwells.

A capital built and rebuilt seven times over, where a twelfth-century minaret, a Mughal fort and a Lutyens boulevard sit within a single afternoon of each other.

A valley of lakes and orchards ringed by the Himalaya, where you sleep on carved cedar houseboats and travel the water by shikara.

A high-altitude desert between the Himalaya and the Karakoram — monasteries on crags, passes above 5,000 metres, and lakes an unreasonable shade of blue.

An archipelago of rainforest and reef in the Bay of Bengal, where the water is genuinely turquoise and the diving is the best in the country.