Ubud is the place in Bali where the island shows what it is like on the inside: palm-leaf offerings on every pavement, family temples behind every gate, gamelan rehearsals as evening falls and rice fields five minutes from the main street. It has no beach and doesn't need one. You come here to walk among rice terraces, watch Balinese dance in a palace, bathe in a sacred spring and eat very well for very little.
It is also the practical base for the centre of the island. From here you head out on sunrise trips up Mount Batur, to the Jatiluwih terraces and to the temples of the Pakerisan valley: Tirta Empul, Gunung Kawi and Goa Gajah. With three or four days you can see the highlights without rushing. A week gives you time to add yoga, a Balinese cooking class and a few walks through the countryside without watching the clock. And in the evening, there is always dance.
It's worth arriving with realistic expectations. Central Ubud has traffic, lots of tourists and prices aimed at foreigners on Monkey Forest street. But all it takes is getting up early, heading out along the Campuhan Ridge or stepping into a neighbourhood warung to find the quiet Ubud. And most temples charge low admission fees, set by Gianyar government regulation, so exploring the area doesn't have to be expensive.
According to tradition, in the 8th century a priest from Java, Rsi Markandya, meditated at Campuhan, where two rivers meet, and founded the Gunung Lebah temple there, which is still a place of pilgrimage. The village's name comes from 'ubad', medicine, after the medicinal plants of the area. The region holds very old traces: the Tirta Empul temple was founded around a spring in 962, during the Warmadewa dynasty, and the royal tombs carved into the rock at Gunung Kawi date from the 11th century. In the late 18th century and throughout the 19th, princes of the house of Sukawati settled in Ubud and Peliatan; in the late 19th century Ubud was the seat of lords allied to the king of Gianyar, who acted as patrons of the arts. In 1927 the German painter Walter Spies arrived, and together with Rudolf Bonnet he drew artists and famous visitors, such as Charlie Chaplin, while training local painters. That is how Ubud's reputation as Bali's artistic centre was born. The last king, Tjokorda Gede Agung Sukawati (1910-1978), lived in the Puri Saren Agung, which his descendants still occupy. In the 1960s the painter Arie Smit launched the Young Artists movement, and from the end of that decade tourism grew. After the 2002 Bali bombings, tourism fell and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival was born. In 2012 UNESCO declared the cultural landscape of the subak irrigation system a World Heritage Site, including the Pakerisan watershed and the Jatiluwih terraces. Since 14 February 2024 Bali has charged a levy on foreign tourists.
Read the full history ↓Indonesia's Hindu island: the last refuge of Majapahit's Hindu-Javanese culture, scene of the tragic puputan of 1906 and today a world-famous destination.
Read the history of Bali →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 17 activities in Bali Ubud. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
According to Balinese tradition, the story of Ubud begins where two rivers meet, in a forest of healing plants. In the 8th century, a priest and sage from Java, Rsi Markandeya, is said to have followed a vision to this part of central Bali and stopped where two rivers join, at a place called Campuhan ('where the waters meet'). There he founded a temple, Gunung Lebah, which still stands, and organised the first settlers to grow rice on terraces. This laid the foundations of the region's farming and spiritual life.
The name Ubud itself gives it away. It comes from the Balinese word 'ubad', meaning 'medicine' or 'remedy', after the healing herbs that grew along the banks of the Campuhan river and were used to cure the sick. From the very beginning, then, this place was linked to healing, the sacred and balance with nature. It is a very Balinese idea, and centuries later it would return in a new form, as Ubud's fame as a wellness and yoga destination.
For centuries Bali was a land of Hindu kingdoms. Its culture grew especially rich after the fall of the Javanese Majapahit empire, between the 15th and 16th centuries. As Islam spread across Java, many Hindu nobles, priests, artists and craftspeople crossed over to Bali, which became the great refuge of Hindu-Javanese civilisation. That heritage of temples, dance, gamelan music, writing and mythology is still alive today in Ubud and across the island.
Over the centuries, power in Bali was split among several rival kingdoms. Ubud grew up around a princely house, a 'puri' (palace), linked to the Sukawati dynasty and later to the kingdom of Gianyar, one of the states in the south of the island. Ubud's royal family steadily gained influence. Above all, it stood out for something that would shape the town's future: its role as a patron of art and culture. In Bali the court did more than govern. It supported artists, commissioned temples, dances and ceremonies, and made artistic refinement a matter of prestige.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, as the Dutch extended their control over the East Indies, the Balinese kingdoms held out longer than almost anywhere else in the archipelago. Bali was not fully subdued until the early 20th century, after brutal campaigns. In 1906 and 1908, as the Dutch advanced, several southern courts carried out the 'puputan', a suicidal fight to the death. Kings, nobles and their subjects, dressed in white and wearing their finest jewellery, charged the colonial troops or took their own lives rather than surrender. Those events left a permanent mark on Balinese memory.
The house of Ubud got through the conquest by making alliances and negotiating its submission. This let it keep much of its prestige and its cultural role under colonial rule. That status, together with its tradition of patronage, put Ubud in a unique position when, in the following decades, the first Westerners fascinated by the island's art began to arrive.
Ubud became a well-known name in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawn by Bali's fame as 'the last paradise island', European artists and intellectuals began to settle there. Two of them were decisive: the German painter and musician Walter Spies, who settled in Campuhan around 1927, and the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet. Both built close ties with the court of Ubud, especially with Prince Cokorda Gede Agung Sukawati, and with local artists.
In 1936 that collaboration gave rise to the Pita Maha artists' association, which brought together Balinese painters and sculptors and helped renew their art and make it better known. Under the influence of Spies and Bonnet, and through contact with new ideas, Balinese painting changed. Alongside the traditional religious and mythological scenes, artists began to paint everyday life, landscapes and people, using new techniques and perspectives. Ubud filled up with workshops and became the creative centre of the island. You can still feel this today in its museums, such as the Puri Lukisan and ARMA, and in its galleries.
Spies also played a key part in bringing Balinese culture to the outside world. He worked on films, hosted famous travellers and helped stage the kecak dance in the form we know today. That golden age put Bali, and Ubud in particular, on the world's cultural map. The Second World War and the Japanese occupation brought the idyll to an end, and Spies died in 1942, during the war. But the seed had been planted: Ubud would forever be synonymous with Balinese art.
After Indonesia's independence, proclaimed in 1945 and recognised in 1949, Bali became part of the new country as a striking exception: a Hindu-majority island in the nation with the largest Muslim population in the world. That religious and cultural difference, with a temple in every home, daily offerings, a calendar packed with ceremonies, and dance and music everywhere, became Bali's greatest attraction over time and the core of its identity. Balinese Hinduism blends beliefs brought from India with local worship of ancestors and nature. It still shapes daily life, and in Ubud it is felt especially strongly.
Tourism had started modestly before the war. It took off strongly from the 1970s and 1980s, first on the southern beaches (Kuta, Sanur) and then inland. Ubud became the cultural, quieter option, the alternative to the coastal party scene: the place to watch dance, visit temples, buy art and immerse yourself in 'authentic Bali'. Its terraced rice fields became one of the island's classic images. They are watered by subak, a cooperative irrigation system more than a thousand years old that UNESCO lists as a World Heritage Site.
Bali has also been through hard times that hit its tourism industry, such as the 2002 terrorist bombings in Kuta, which killed more than two hundred people, and the various crises that have slowed travel at different points. But the island bounced back each time, and Ubud kept growing as its cultural heart, keeping a delicate balance between living tradition and the tourist economy.
Over the last two decades, Ubud has made another leap, from centre of Balinese art to world capital of wellness and spiritual tourism. Its international fame soared largely thanks to popular culture. The bestseller 'Eat, Pray, Love', published in 2006, and its 2010 film adaptation starring Julia Roberts set the final stage of their spiritual quest in Ubud. That brought the town's name to millions of people around the world. Almost overnight, Ubud became synonymous with yoga, retreats, meditation, healing and personal reinvention.
The phenomenon changed the town. Yoga studios, vegan and healthy-food cafés, spas, wellness retreats and every kind of accommodation sprang up, from family homestays to luxury resorts perched above the ravines. Today Ubud draws a varied crowd: culture lovers, spiritual seekers, digital nomads, backpackers and high-end tourists. The downside is overtourism: traffic, rising prices, packed hotspots in high season and a constant tension between the traditional village and the tourism machine.
Even so, beneath the layer of smoothies and yoga classes, Ubud has kept its essence. The daily offerings on the ground are still there, along with active temples, ceremonies that bring streets to a standstill, dances at sunset and rice fields worked by hand. The challenge, for the community and for travellers, is to protect that cultural and spiritual core without letting success swallow it. Anyone who looks beyond the tourist surface can still find in Ubud the same forest of medicinal plants, sacred rivers and art that gave the town its name more than a thousand years ago.
