Few places in the world hit you like Varanasi. At dawn, wrapped in mist and smoke, the city looks out over the Ganges: pilgrims walk down the steps of the ghats to immerse themselves in the sacred water, bells and chants ring out, incense burns, petals and little lamps float by, and a few metres away, with no attempt to hide it, the funeral pyres burn too. Here life and death are not hidden: they are shown, celebrated and prayed over on the banks of the same river. For Hindus, dying in Kashi and being cremated on the banks of the Ganges frees the soul from the cycle of reincarnation. It is perhaps the most spiritual and most intense city on the planet.
Varanasi —formerly Benares, to Hindus Kashi, 'the city of light'— is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, sacred to Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. It is dizzyingly chaotic: alleys packed so tight there's no room to move, cows in the middle of the crowds, motorbikes, white-bearded sadhus, silk merchants, vendors, monkeys and pilgrims from all over India. But it is also hypnotic: the sunrise boat ride, the Ganga Aarti fire ceremony at sunset, the maze of temples and the weight of thousands of years of devotion leave a mark that never fades.
This guide helps you move through that intensity with respect and common sense: when and how to take the boat ride, where to watch the aarti, how to behave near the cremations (with great respect and without taking photos), what everything costs, how to get to Sarnath and how to protect yourself from the scams and the hassling of tourists, which does happen. Varanasi is not a 'pretty' city in the conventional sense: it is a place you feel in your gut, and one that many travellers remember, forever, as the most striking part of their whole trip through India.
Varanasi is one of the oldest living cities in the world: Hindus believe it was founded by the god Shiva and has existed since the beginning of time, and there is evidence of continuous settlement going back at least 3.000 years. Under the name Kashi it was already, in the time of the Buddha (6th century BC), a great urban centre and place of pilgrimage; very close by, in Sarnath, the Buddha delivered his first sermon after his enlightenment. Over the centuries it was the capital of kingdoms, a magnet for sages, poets and musicians, and the centre of the silk industry. Many of its temples were destroyed during the centuries of rule by Muslim sultanates and empires —the current Kashi Vishwanath temple was rebuilt in the 18th century by Queen Ahilyabai Holkar after the earlier one had been razed— and it was reborn again and again. Today it remains the spiritual heart of Hinduism, the destination of millions of pilgrims who come to bathe in the Ganges, to pray and to die in the sacred city. Its long history, from Shiva to the sultans and from the kings to the present day, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The sacred river and the cradle of British power: Varanasi, Hinduism's oldest holy city on the banks of the Ganges, and Darjeeling, the Bengal tea station beneath the Himalayan peaks.
Read the history of The east and the Ganges →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 8 activities in Varanasi. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Hindu tradition holds that Varanasi was not founded by any king or any people, but by the god Shiva himself, and that it has existed since the beginning of time. Older than history, older than memory, the sages used to say: an eternal city. The writer Mark Twain, who visited at the end of the 19th century, summed up that reputation in a famous line: Benares struck him as older than history, tradition and legend all put together. The line is poetic exaggeration, but it points to something real: Varanasi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the planet.
Beyond the myth, archaeology confirms an urban settlement on the banks of the Ganges going back at least 3,000 years. Its ancient name, and the one Hindus use, is Kashi, usually translated as 'the city of light', because it is considered illuminated by Shiva's divine energy. The name Varanasi is said to come from the two rivers that frame it, the Varuna and the Assi, which flow into the Ganges at its northern and southern ends. The British called it Benares, a distortion of the name that is still widely used.
For Hinduism, Kashi is the holiest place on earth. It is believed that whoever dies here and is cremated on the banks of the Ganges attains moksha, liberation from the endless cycle of birth and death. That is why, for thousands of years, millions of pilgrims have come to bathe in the river, to pray and, many of them, to die. This status as a holy city, a threshold between life and death, is the key to everything Varanasi is and has been.
In the first millennium BCE, Kashi was already a large, prosperous city, capital of one of the sixteen great kingdoms (mahajanapadas) into which northern India was divided. It was a centre of trade (famous for its textiles and perfumes), of pilgrimage and of thought, where the ideas of the age crossed paths. In that climate of spiritual ferment, a figure appeared in the 6th century BCE who would change the history of Asia: Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.
After attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, the Buddha walked to the outskirts of Kashi, to a place called Sarnath, the Deer Park, and there gave his first sermon to five disciples. That discourse, in which he set out the Four Noble Truths, is known as the 'setting in motion of the wheel of the Dharma' and marks the birth of Buddhism as an organised teaching, along with its first community of monks. That is why Sarnath is one of the four holiest places in Buddhism anywhere in the world.
Centuries later, in the 3rd century BCE, the great emperor Ashoka, a convert to Buddhism, had stupas built at Sarnath along with a pillar crowned by four lions. That Lion Capital of Ashoka would become, more than two thousand years later, the national emblem of modern India. Kashi, meanwhile, kept growing as a holy city for Hindus, but also for Buddhists and Jains, a rare meeting point for the great religions born on the subcontinent. Chinese pilgrims such as Xuanzang, who visited in the 7th century, left accounts of its splendour, its temples and its devotion.
The medieval and modern history of Varanasi is a succession of destruction and rebirth. From the 12th century onwards, with the arrival in northern India of the Muslim sultanates and, later, the Mughal Empire, Hinduism's holy city suffered repeated campaigns in which many of its temples were looted and torn down. The great Vishwanath temple, dedicated to Shiva and the spiritual heart of the city, was destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries.
The best-remembered episode came in the 17th century under the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, whose religious policy was uncompromising. He ordered the destruction of the Vishwanath temple and the construction of a mosque in its place (the Gyanvapi mosque, which still stands next to the current temple and is today a source of tension and litigation). It was a crushing symbolic blow for Hindus. And yet the city never stopped being the centre of their faith: it remained full of pilgrims, scholars, poets and musicians.
The rebirth came in the 18th century. In 1780, Queen Ahilyabai Holkar, ruler of the Maratha kingdom of Indore and renowned for her piety, funded the rebuilding of the Kashi Vishwanath temple on a site next to the original, giving it the form it has today. Shortly afterwards, a maharaja from Punjab donated the gold that covers its dome, hence the nickname 'Golden Temple'. In the same period, many of the ghats and palaces we see today along the river were built or rebuilt by kings and nobles from all over India, who considered raising a ghat in the holy city an act of religious merit. That is how the monumental Varanasi we know today came into being.
Beyond religion, Varanasi was for centuries one of India's great cultural capitals. Under the patronage of the Maharajas of Benares (a local dynasty that ruled the region from the 18th century, based at Ramnagar Fort) and of countless devotees, the city became a magnet for scholars, poets and artists from across the subcontinent.
Above all, it was a great centre of Hindu learning and of Sanskrit: its schools and its scholars (the pandits of Benares) were famous throughout India, and studying the sacred texts here was the dream of generations of students. In 1916 Banaras Hindu University (BHU) was founded, and it would become one of the largest and most prestigious universities in Asia. The city was also the birthplace of the great mystic poet Kabir in the 15th century, whose poetry, which mocked Hindu and Muslim dogma alike and preached a single god beyond religions, is still alive in Indian popular culture.
Benares is also a capital of Indian classical music: legendary performers came out of its lanes, such as the shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan, and the city has its own school (gharana) of music and of kathak dance. And it is famous for its textile industry: Benares silk saris (Banarasi silk), woven with gold and silver thread on family looms passed down from generation to generation, are considered the finest in India and an essential piece at Hindu weddings. Religion, learning, music and silk: four threads woven together into the city's unique character.
Twenty-first-century Varanasi is still, above all, Hinduism's holy city: every year millions of pilgrims arrive from all over India to bathe in the Ganges, pray at its temples, scatter the ashes of their dead in the river or spend their last days in the sacred city in the hope of moksha. The ghats at dawn, the smoke from cremation fires that never go out and the Ganga Aarti ceremony at sunset are still the city's heartbeat, just as they were centuries ago.
But Varanasi is also a modern, changing city, with more than a million inhabitants, traffic, pollution and all the challenges of a growing Indian city. One of the big issues is the health of the Ganges itself: the river, worshipped as a goddess, is severely polluted by sewage and industrial waste, and cleaning it up is the goal of ambitious (and difficult) government programmes. In recent years the city has also gone through a very visible urban transformation with the construction of the Kashi Vishwanath Dham, the large corridor opened in 2021 that cleared the maze of lanes around the main temple to connect it with the river. Many celebrated the project; others criticised it, seeing it as the loss of part of the historic centre.
Varanasi also carries simmering religious tensions, such as the legal dispute over the Gyanvapi mosque next to the temple, which reopens old wounds. And it still struggles with mass tourism and with the scams visitors sometimes fall for. But none of that has changed its essence. For the traveller, Varanasi remains what it has always been: an overwhelming place where life and death sit side by side on the bank of a sacred river, and where thousands of years of devotion can be felt on every stone step leading down to the Ganges. Few cities in the world leave such a deep mark.
