Siem Reap is one of those cities whose name is inseparably linked to a wonder: Angkor. A few kilometres from its streets stands the largest temple complex in the world, the spiritual heart of the ancient Khmer empire, which is why Siem Reap is, for almost every traveller, the must-stop in Cambodia. But it would be unfair to see it merely as Angkor's dormitory: it's a likeable city with a tropical rhythm, craft markets, active Buddhist temples, massage spas, a surprising food scene and nightlife centred on the famous Pub Street.
The contrast is part of its charm. By day you tour the thousand-year-old temples by tuk-tuk, wrapped in jungle and silence; at sunset you return to the city to stroll through the night market, eat an amok (Cambodian fish curry) and have a drink under coloured lanterns. Around it, the great Tonlé Sap lake spreads out its floating villages and its way of life on the water, and the countryside hides distant temples that hardly anyone visits. Siem Reap combines the weight of history with the warmth of Cambodia today.
This guide organises the visit with a practical eye: how many days to spend, which Angkor temples are unmissable and how to plan them, how to get to the Tonlé Sap, how much admission and transport cost, and where to eat and sleep depending on your budget. With patience for the heat and the curiosity to step off the circuit, Siem Reap offers some of the most intense memories of an entire trip through Southeast Asia.
Although it lives off tourism today, Siem Reap stands at the gates of one of the most dazzling civilisations in history. Between the 9th and 15th centuries, neighbouring Angkor was the capital of the Khmer empire, one of the most powerful and sophisticated states in Southeast Asia, which came to rule much of present-day Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. Kings such as Suryavarman II —who built Angkor Wat in the 12th century— and Jayavarman VII —who raised Angkor Thom and the Bayon— left monumental temples and a network of reservoirs and canals that sustained one of the largest pre-industrial cities in the world. The decline of Angkor and its sacking by the kingdom of Ayutthaya (Siam) in 1431 marked the end of that era; the very name of Siem Reap recalls those wars with Siam. For centuries the temples lay half-forgotten in the jungle, until in the 19th century European travellers and archaeologists —and above all the Cambodians themselves, who never stopped venerating them— brought them back to the world. 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) →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few city names are as combative as Siem Reap's. In Khmer, 'Siem Reap' means, roughly, 'the defeat of Siam', that is, the defeat of the Thais. Popular tradition links it to a victory of the Cambodian kingdom over the army of the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, at some point during the wars that pitted the two peoples against each other for centuries over control of this rich plain. Legend or history, the place name sums up a key fact: Siem Reap grew up on a disputed frontier, a stone's throw from the ruins of what had been the most dazzling capital in Southeast Asia.
Because the real story of Siem Reap doesn't begin in today's city, but a few kilometres to the north, at Angkor. There, between the 9th and 15th centuries, the heart of the Khmer Empire flourished: a civilisation that raised hundreds of stone temples, ran a gigantic hydraulic system and supported what many historians consider the largest pre-industrial city in the world. Siem Reap, the modern city, is simply the heir and guardian of that splendour: it was born and grew as the settlement at the gates of Angkor.
For a long time it was little more than that: a cluster of villages along the Siem Reap River, on land that changed hands between Cambodians and Siamese. Its fate would change forever when the world 'rediscovered' the temples next door and started arriving, first in a trickle and then in droves, to see them.
The Khmer Empire is usually dated from the year 802, when King Jayavarman II proclaimed himself 'universal monarch' (chakravartin) on Mount Kulen, near present-day Siem Reap, and founded a dynasty that would rule from the Angkor region. Over the following centuries, his successors turned this plain into the centre of an extremely powerful state that, at its peak, extended its influence over much of present-day Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and southern Vietnam.
Angkor's greatness rested on two pillars. The first was water: the Khmers built enormous artificial reservoirs (the 'baray', some of them several kilometres long), canals and dykes that made it possible to control the monsoon, irrigate the rice fields and feed a huge population. The second was religion: the kings identified themselves with the Hindu gods (Shiva, Vishnu) and, later, with Buddhism, and expressed that divine power by raising temple-mountains that represented Mount Meru, the axis of the universe.
Two kings mark the high point of that splendour. Suryavarman II, in the first half of the 12th century, had Angkor Wat built and dedicated to Vishnu: the largest religious monument in the world, today a symbol of Cambodia that even appears on its flag. Decades later, Jayavarman VII, the great Buddhist king, built the walled city of Angkor Thom with the Bayon temple and its enigmatic stone faces, as well as hospitals, roads and temples such as Ta Prohm. Under his reign, at the end of the 12th century, Angkor reached its greatest extent.
After Angkor was abandoned as the capital in the 15th century, the great temples were never entirely forgotten: Buddhist monks went on living and praying at Angkor Wat, and Khmer farmers never stopped venerating those stones. But to the outside world, Angkor became a lost city in the jungle, wrapped in legend.
In the 19th century, European explorers began spreading word of it in the West. The name associated with this 'rediscovery' is that of the French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who visited Angkor in 1860 and described the temples in awe in diaries that were published after his death and caused a sensation in Europe. Mouhot wasn't the first Westerner to see them — missionaries and travellers had come before —, but his accounts and illustrations sparked worldwide fascination with Angkor.
Shortly afterwards, in 1863, Cambodia became a protectorate of France, within what would become French Indochina. The French promoted the study, mapping and restoration of the temples through the French School of the Far East (EFEO), which worked at Angkor for decades. In 1907, the kingdom of Siam returned to Cambodia the provinces of Siem Reap and Battambang, which it had controlled, and Angkor came once again under Cambodian (and French) administration. That was when Siem Reap began to change: the first hotels for travellers arrived, among them the legendary Grand Hôtel, and the town got ready to welcome curious visitors from all over the world.
The 20th century brought terrible decades to Cambodia, and to Siem Reap. After independence from France in 1953, the country lived in a fragile balance under King (later Prince) Norodom Sihanouk, until the Vietnam War spilled over its borders. Cambodia was dragged into the conflict: US bombing of the east of the country and the internal civil war paved the way for tragedy.
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist guerrilla movement led by Pol Pot, seized power and subjected Cambodia to one of the most brutal regimes of the 20th century. In just three years and eight months (1975-1979), their attempt to build an agrarian utopia by emptying the cities, imposing forced labour and eliminating every 'class enemy' cost the lives of around 1.7 to 2 million people, through hunger, disease, exhaustion and executions. The Siem Reap region and the temples of Angkor were left in a war zone; tourism disappeared completely, and for years Angkor was the scene of fighting, looting and minefields.
The fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, after the Vietnamese invasion, didn't bring peace right away: the civil war went on in the north-west of the country, near Siem Reap, well into the 1990s. The temples suffered neglect, the theft of sculptures and war damage. Only with lasting peace and the inscription of Angkor as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1992 did a new era of restoration and returning visitors begin.
Since the 1990s, and above all in the 21st century, Siem Reap has gone through a dizzying transformation. From a sleepy town battered by war it became Cambodia's most important tourist city and one of the most visited in Southeast Asia. The mass arrival of travellers coming to see Angkor multiplied hotels, restaurants, agencies and jobs, and the city filled up with night markets, spas and the lively Pub Street.
That growth has its bright and dark sides. On the one hand, tourism lifted thousands of families out of poverty and funded the conservation of the temples. On the other, it brought challenges: pressure on the monuments from the sheer number of visitors, the pumping of groundwater that threatened to make the ground beneath Angkor sink, and the tricky balance between development and preservation. Cambodian authorities and international organisations are working to regulate visits, and the new Siem Reap-Angkor airport, opened in 2023 and located away from the temples, aims precisely to reduce the impact of aircraft on the ancient stones.
Today Siem Reap is a city looking to the future without forgetting where it comes from. The overwhelming weight of Angkor sits alongside the warmth of present-day Cambodia: monks collecting alms at dawn, markets full of life, Khmer cooking making its way around the world, social projects giving work and education to young people marked by history. Above all, it remains the guardian of a treasure of humanity: the doorway through which millions of people each year glimpse the lost and recovered splendour of the Khmer Empire.
