Angkor Wat is one of those wonders that goes beyond any expectation. The largest religious monument in the world, built in the 12th century by King Suryavarman II and dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, it is Cambodia's ultimate symbol: it's on the flag, on the beer, at the heart of the country's identity. Its five lotus-bud towers, reflected in the ponds at sunrise, make up one of the most iconic images on the planet and the dream of every traveller in Asia.
But Angkor Wat is just the centrepiece of an immense treasure. Around it stretches the Angkor Archaeological Park, with the walled city of Angkor Thom and its Bayon temple, crowned by dozens of enigmatic stone faces smiling down from above; with Ta Prohm, the temple swallowed by giant roots that the jungle never let go of; and with dozens more sanctuaries, some restored and others still wrapped in jungle. It is the monumental legacy of the Khmer Empire, one of the most dazzling civilisations in history.
This guide focuses on the temples: what to see, in what order, how much the Angkor Pass costs, how to plan one, two or three days, how to dodge the heat and the crowds, and how to read the reliefs and legends the stones tell. Exploring Angkor with patience and curiosity (sunrise at Angkor Wat, getting lost in the Bayon, seeking shade at Ta Prohm) is one of the great moments of any trip. The base for all of this is Siem Reap, which has its own page.
Angkor Wat was built in the first half of the 12th century by King Suryavarman II as a temple-mountain dedicated to Vishnu and, probably, as his own mausoleum. Its name means 'temple city' or 'city of monasteries', and its design recreates Mount Meru, the home of the Hindu gods: the five central towers are its five peaks, the walls are the mountain ranges and the huge moat around it is the cosmic ocean. Along almost a kilometre of galleries, its walls are covered in bas-reliefs telling episodes from the Hindu epics (the Ramayana and the Mahabharata) and the famous scene of the 'Churning of the Ocean of Milk'. Over time, Hinduism gave way to Buddhism, and Angkor Wat became (and still is today) an active Buddhist temple, never ceasing to be a place of worship. Unlike other Angkor temples, it was never completely abandoned. After the Siamese sacked Angkor in 1431 and power shifted south, it remained in the care of Buddhist monks. The 'rediscovery' that made it famous in the West came in the 19th century. The full history of the Khmer Empire and Angkor is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The archaeological heart of Cambodia: the plain north of the Tonlé Sap where the Khmer empire built Angkor, its capitals lost in the jungle and the colonial towns that surround them.
Read the history of Northwest (Angkor and temples) →They depart from Siem Reap, 6 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Imagine a temple so big that its moat alone encloses a rectangle one and a half kilometres long and more than a kilometre wide. It is aligned so precisely that, twice a year, the sun rises exactly over its central tower. Every wall, tower and pool carries meaning, and together they form a map of the cosmos. That is Angkor Wat, the largest religious temple ever built and the masterpiece of a civilisation that, nine centuries ago, ruled Southeast Asia from these plains.
Angkor Wat isn't just beautiful: it's a statement in stone. Its five lotus-bud towers stand for the five peaks of Mount Meru, the sacred mountain where, in Hindu belief, the gods live. The concentric walls are the mountain ranges that surround it, and the great moat around the temple is the primordial cosmic ocean. To its builders, walking through Angkor Wat meant making a symbolic journey from the world of humans to the home of the divine.
Building something like this was a feat of engineering, organisation and faith. Millions of sandstone blocks were brought from quarries tens of kilometres away, then carved and fitted together with astonishing precision and no mortar. And it was all done, it is believed, in just a few decades, under a single king: Suryavarman II.
Angkor Wat was commissioned in the first half of the 12th century by Suryavarman II, one of the great kings of the Khmer Empire, who took the throne around 1113 after a struggle for power. Under his rule the empire grew considerably through military and diplomatic expansion, with campaigns against neighbouring kingdoms and contacts with Song dynasty China. But his lasting legacy was this temple.
Most Khmer temples were dedicated to the god Shiva, but Suryavarman II dedicated Angkor Wat to Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, with whom the king himself identified. Many scholars believe the temple was also designed as his mausoleum or funerary temple. One striking detail supports this: its bas-reliefs are read anticlockwise, the opposite of the usual direction, and in Hindu tradition that direction is associated with funeral rites.
The bas-reliefs may be the most extraordinary thing about Angkor Wat. Along nearly 800 metres of gallery, teams of sculptors told episodes from the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. They also carved scenes of heaven and hell and the king's own battles. Above all, they carved the myth of the 'Churning of the Ocean of Milk', in which gods and demons pull on a colossal serpent coiled around a mountain to stir the ocean and draw from it the elixir of immortality. It is one of the most impressive narratives in stone anywhere in the world.
Angkor Wat didn't come out of nowhere: it was the temple of the capital of an empire at its height. The Khmer Empire is usually dated from the year 802, when King Jayavarman II declared himself 'universal monarch' near this area and founded a dynasty that would rule for six centuries. Over that time, the Khmer kings built a series of capitals in the Angkor region. They put up hundreds of temples and palaces and a huge water network of reservoirs and canals that controlled the monsoon rains and made it possible to grow rice in abundance.
That intensive farming fed an enormous population. Recent studies using airborne laser scanning (lidar) have shown that medieval Angkor was a vast, low-density city. With its suburbs, it may have housed hundreds of thousands of people, which would make it one of the largest urban areas of the pre-industrial world. It wasn't just a group of temples: it was a metropolis.
Decades after Suryavarman II, the empire had another golden age under Jayavarman VII, the great Buddhist king. After driving back an invasion from the kingdom of Champa, he rebuilt the capital as Angkor Thom, with the Bayon temple and its stone faces at its centre. He also built temple-monasteries such as Ta Prohm and Preah Khan, along with hospitals and roads. Under his rule, at the end of the 12th century, Angkor reached its greatest size and splendour.
Over the centuries the religion of Angkor changed, and Angkor Wat changed with it. Built as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, it gradually became a place of Buddhist worship. Buddhism became the dominant faith in Cambodia, and Theravada Buddhism is still the majority religion today. Images of the Buddha were placed inside the temple, and Buddhist monks turned it into a pilgrimage site that was never fully abandoned. That continuous religious use is why Angkor Wat survived in much better condition than other temples.
The rest of Angkor was less fortunate. From the 14th century onwards, the empire went into a long decline, and historians still debate why. The suggested causes include increasingly costly wars with the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, which sacked Angkor in 1431, and the rise of sea trade, which shifted the centre of power south, near today's Phnom Penh. Religious change also made the huge royal temples less meaningful. Recent research adds a series of extreme droughts followed by violent monsoons, which may have damaged the water system the whole city depended on.
So the Khmer court moved south, and Angkor, the great metropolis, was gradually left half-empty. The jungle began to reclaim temples such as Ta Prohm. But Angkor Wat lived on: incense never stopped burning inside its walls, and later Cambodian kings always regarded it as a sacred symbol of their nation.
Cambodians never 'lost' Angkor Wat. They kept worshipping there and making pilgrimages to it. To the outside world, though, Angkor became a legendary city hidden in the jungle. In the 19th century, the French naturalist Henri Mouhot visited the temples in 1860, and his accounts and drawings caused a sensation in Europe and sparked Western fascination with Angkor. The French protectorate over Cambodia, from 1863, brought the first archaeological expeditions. Later came a huge programme of study and restoration led by the École française d'Extrême-Orient.
In the 20th century, Angkor Wat became the emblem of Cambodian identity. Its outline has appeared on the national flag for decades, making Cambodia one of the few countries in the world with a building on its flag. It also appears on the coat of arms, on banknotes and even in the name of the local beer. Not even the darkest years could erase that symbol. During the civil war and the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979), the region became a conflict zone, the temples were looted and damaged, and tourism disappeared. Still, for Cambodians, Angkor Wat remained the heart of their history.
A new era began when the war ended and Angkor was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1992. Since then, international teams have worked to conserve the temples, and millions of visitors come every year to see them. Today, watching the sun rise over the towers of Angkor Wat as they reflect in the water is one of the great moments any trip can offer. It is proof in stone that a civilisation once thought lost is still dazzling the world nine centuries later.
