Heritage in South Asia
A region of profound spirituality, towering mountains, and deep river valleys.
Sites in this Region
Showing 6 documented sites
Adam's Peak (Sri Pada)
Adam's Peak — Sri Pada, the Sacred Footprint — is a 2,243-metre conical mountain in the Sri Lankan highlands whose summit rock formation is venerated as a sacred footprint by four of the world's major religions simultaneously. For over a thousand years, pilgrims of all these faiths have climbed 5,500 steps through the night to reach the same summit at the same dawn, making it one of the oldest continuously shared sacred sites in the world. The mountain's surrounding cloud forest is a biodiversity hotspot containing over 150 endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth.
Attirampakkam
A stratified sequence of stone tool assemblages spanning approximately 1.5 million years, from the earliest known Acheulean handaxe technology in peninsular India through a transition to Middle Palaeolithic technology that appears — according to radiometric dating published in 2018 — significantly earlier than the same transition in Africa and Europe, potentially before the dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and challenging fundamental assumptions about the cognitive and demographic history of early humans in South Asia.
Hampi
A 26-square-kilometre open landscape of approximately 550 monuments distributed across an extraordinary terrain of stacked granite boulders along the Tungabhadra River — once the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire, one of the wealthiest and most populous cities on earth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Temples, bazaars, royal pavilions, elephant stables, and sacred tanks appear across ridgelines and around corners in a landscape that feels less like a heritage site and more like a civilisation that forgot to fully disappear. Large sections remain in active religious use, as they have been for over a thousand years.
Harappa
One of the two great cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, a Bronze Age urban culture that at its height was probably the most populous civilisation on earth, organised around a level of urban planning sophistication — standardised brick dimensions, grid streets, elaborate drainage systems — that remains remarkable even in comparison with much later achievements, and whose undeciphered script represents one of the outstanding unsolved problems of ancient linguistics.
Lothal
The southernmost major site of the Indus Valley Civilisation and home to what is widely considered the world's oldest known artificial dock — a tidal basin measuring 218 by 37 metres, lined with kiln-fired bricks, that demonstrates the maritime capabilities and long-distance trading reach of a Bronze Age civilisation four thousand years ago, now facing coastal erosion, sea level rise, and the dual pressure of inadequate conservation resources and a major new heritage complex development.
Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum of white marble built between 1632 and 1653 by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth. Widely considered the supreme expression of Mughal architecture, it is one of the most formally perfect buildings in the world. The marble is turning yellow from industrial pollution. Midges breeding in the polluted Yamuna River are staining it green and black. The wooden foundations beneath the minarets are drying out as the water table drops, and eight million people a year walk past.