Updated August 2026
Bali temples
There are tens of thousands of them, and the honest number worth planning your day around is closer to six. Here is which ones, what to wear, and why the other lists will not tell you.
Bali has temples in an order of magnitude nobody has ever properly counted, somewhere in the tens of thousands. Every village maintains three by religious obligation, every family compound has its own shrine in the north-east corner, and every irrigation cooperative in the rice terraces has one too. Almost none of them are visitor sites, and that is the part the listicles skip when they promise you the thirty best.
What separates the handful worth driving to is not architecture, which is remarkably consistent across the island, but setting: a lake, a cliff, a spring, a volcano. Choose on that basis and two temples will stay with you for years. Choose from a top-thirty list and you will see the same courtyard six times, in a car, in the heat, and wonder why everyone raves about them.
This page is the transversal half of the subject: what to wear and who lends it to you, the rules printed on the entrance signs, how a Balinese temple is actually laid out so that you can read one when you are standing in it, and how to group the good ones geographically. The individual verdicts live on the guides further down.
The driving is the hard part
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If you only do two
- One for the setting: Ulun Danu Beratan on its lake, or Lempuyang framing Mount Agung.
- One for the living religion: Tirta Empul, where Balinese families queue at the spouts every day of the year, or Besakih, the mother temple.
- Go early. Doors open around dawn. The first two hours are cooler, emptier and photograph better than anything the rest of the day offers.
- Sarong and covered shoulders. The sarong is lent at the gate. The shoulders are on you.
Why there are so many, and what a pura actually is
Understanding the system takes five minutes and changes every temple you subsequently walk into. Most visitors never get told any of it.
Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country on earth, and Bali is the one province where Hinduism stayed. Roughly nine islanders in ten practise Agama Hindu Dharma, a version that absorbed Buddhist elements and a much older Austronesian ancestor worship on the way through, which is why a Balinese temple looks nothing like a temple in India. There is no enclosed hall and no central statue of a god. A pura is a walled open-air compound: courtyards, gateways, pavilions and empty shrines that the gods are invited into on festival days and that stand vacant the rest of the time.
That is also why there are so many. Every traditional village is obliged to maintain three, together called the kahyangan tiga: a pura puseh at the upstream end for origins and Vishnu, a pura desa in the middle for the living community and Brahma, and a pura dalem at the downstream end, associated with Shiva, the cemetery and the dead. Overlay on that a shrine in every family compound, a temple for every clan, every market, every irrigation cooperative, and the number stops being surprising.
Above all of those sit the island-wide sanctuaries. The sad kahyangan, the six great temples regarded as the spiritual pillars of Bali, are the ones that make an itinerary: different sources list them differently, but Besakih and Lempuyang appear on all of them, and Uluwatu and Goa Lawah on most. Their religious weight is why they look after themselves regardless of the tourism, and why a ceremony there can close the gates to you at an hour's notice.
The last category is the one nobody sells tickets for and it is arguably the most interesting. The water temples administer subak, the thousand-year-old irrigation network that shares river water between rice cooperatives across a whole watershed, priest by priest rather than office by office. UNESCO listed that system as a cultural landscape. You can see its downstream end in the terraces around Ubud without ever noticing the temples that run it.
A village temple on a ceremony day. Sarong, sash and a lace kebaya for the women, offerings carried on the head. This is what the buildings are for, and it happens somewhere on the island almost every day.
How to read a Balinese temple
Every pura on the island, from the mother temple down to a village compound, uses the same handful of parts in the same order. Learn them once and you can walk into any of them and know where you are.
Three courtyards, from the world to the gods
A temple is laid out along an axis running from the sea, which is impure, towards the mountain, which is holy. You move through three walled courtyards in increasing order of sanctity. The outer one, jaba pisan or nista mandala, is a public space: markets set up here, gamelan groups rehearse, cockfights used to be held. The middle one, jaba tengah or madya mandala, holds the kitchens where offerings are prepared, the granary and the drum tower. The inner one, jeroan or utama mandala, holds the shrines, and it is the one you will usually be asked to look into rather than enter.
That last point causes more confusion than anything else on a temple visit. Being stopped at the third gate is not a scam, an upsell or a slight. It is the difference between a monument and a working sanctuary, and it applies to Balinese people too if they are not there to pray. Taman Ayun is the clearest case: you walk a path around the outside of the inner court and get a better view of it than you would standing inside.
The two gates, and why one is split
Between the first and second courtyards stands the candi bentar, a gate that looks like a single tower sliced vertically in two and pulled apart. Nobody is certain what it originally meant. The readings you will hear are the splitting of Mount Meru, the balance of opposites, or a threshold you pass through rather than a door you open. It is the shape on the cover of every book about Bali and the one at Lempuyang is the most photographed object on the island.
The gate into the inner court is a different animal: the kori agung, roofed, closed with a door, usually with a grotesque protective face carved above it and a pair of guardian statues below. Directly behind it you will nearly always find a short free-standing wall, the aling-aling. It exists because malevolent spirits are held to travel in straight lines, so the wall forces a turn. It also, entirely practically, stops anyone outside seeing straight into the sanctuary.
The inner court at Taman Ayun, viewed from the path outside the wall. Each of those thatched towers is a meru, and the number of roofs on each one is information rather than decoration.
Ulun Danu Beratan on Lake Bratan. Count the roofs on the large shrine: eleven, the maximum, which tells you exactly how senior the deity honoured there is.
The meru, and counting its roofs
The black thatched pagodas rising over the inner wall are merus, named for the cosmic mountain of Hindu cosmology, and their roofs are stacked in a diminishing tower of sugar palm fibre. The number of tiers is always odd, running from three up to eleven, and it encodes the rank of whatever is honoured beneath it. Eleven is the highest and is reserved for the most senior deities and for deified royal ancestors of the first order.
This is the single most useful thing you can carry into a Balinese temple, because it converts a row of similar-looking towers into a readable hierarchy. At Taman Ayun the merus step down in height across the court in a deliberate order. At Besakih there are dozens of them across a whole hillside.
Two other structures repeat everywhere. The padmasana is a tall stone throne standing empty in the north-east corner of the inner court, dedicated to the supreme god Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa; it is empty because he is not depicted. The bale kulkul is the tower at the corner of the outer wall holding a hollowed wooden slit drum, whose rhythm calls the village to a ceremony, to a meeting or to an emergency, each with its own pattern.
The rest of the compound is bale, open pavilions with no walls, used for gamelan, for preparing offerings and for sitting out of the sun. When a temple looks half empty to you, that is because it is: the gods are only in residence during a festival, and for the other two hundred days the compound is a set of beautifully maintained empty rooms waiting for one.
Which temple is actually yours
Every list ranks temples as though everyone reading it were staying in the same hotel with the same amount of time. These are the three variables that decide it in practice.
Which temple is yours
Three things decide the answer, and no list of thirty temples can know any of them: where you sleep, how much of the day you will give up, and what you actually came for.
Go here
Tirta Empul, then Gunung Kawi
The purification spring at opening, then the rock-cut shrines at Gunung Kawi ten minutes up the road, carved into a river gorge and reached by a long staircase through rice terraces. Two very different centuries in one morning.
- Time it takes
- Half a day from Ubud
- Add to it
- Both sit north of Ubud on the Tampaksiring road, so this is one drive rather than two.
- What it costs you
- Three hundred steps back up from Gunung Kawi in the heat.
The big nine, side by side
Time on site is time inside the gate and excludes the drive, which on this island is usually the larger number. Crowd levels assume the dry season.
| Temple | Where | Time on site | Crowds | Guide worth it | Combine with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Besakih | East, on Mount Agung | 2 to 3 h | Heavy from 10:00, orderly | Useful | Sidemen, Tirta Empul |
| Lempuyang | Far east, Karangasem | 2 to 4 h, mostly queue | Severe after 09:00 | No | Tirta Gangga |
| Tirta Empul | Central, north of Ubud | 1 h 30 to 2 h | Heavy from 09:30 | Yes, for the ritual | Gunung Kawi |
| Ulun Danu Beratan | Highlands, Lake Bratan | 1 to 2 h | Heavy from 10:00 | No | Taman Ayun, Munduk |
| Taman Ayun | West, Mengwi | 1 h | Light all day | No | Ulun Danu Beratan, Tanah Lot |
| Tirta Gangga | East, Karangasem | 1 to 2 h | Moderate | No | Lempuyang, Taman Ujung |
| Tanah Lot | South-west coast | 1 h 30 | Severe at sunset | No | Taman Ayun |
| Uluwatu | Far south, the cliffs | 1 h 30, plus kecak | Severe at sunset | No | Jimbaran, the southern beaches |
| Goa Gajah | Central, near Ubud | 45 min | Moderate | Optional | Tirta Empul, Ubud |
Read down the crowd column and the pattern is obvious. Taman Ayun and Tirta Gangga are the two quiet ones, and they are quiet for the same reason: neither has a single famous photograph attached to it. Everything with an image in circulation has a queue behind that image, and the queue is the actual product being distributed on social media, cropped out.
The temples worth the drive
Each with a straight verdict, the real cost of getting in, and what it is like at the hour you will actually arrive.
Temple
Taman Ayun Temple, Mengwi: Full Visitor Guide
The royal temple of Mengwi, ringed by a moat and rarely crowded. What you actually see, why the inner court is closed, and how it fits the western loop.
Read the guide →Temple
Tirta Empul Temple: The Purification Ritual, Explained
Tirta Empul near Ubud is a working purification temple, not a photo stop. How the melukat ritual works spout by spout, the two you skip, and when to go.
Read the guide →Temple
Ulun Danu Beratan Temple: When It Floats, and When It Does Not
The lake temple at Bedugul only floats when Lake Bratan is high. Water levels month by month, the best hour to arrive, and whether it earns the drive.
Read the guide →Temple
Lempuyang Temple: The Gates of Heaven and the Mirror
There is no lake at the Gates of Heaven. How the reflection is made, how long the queue runs, when Mount Agung shows, and whether Lempuyang earns the drive.
Read the guide →Temple
Besakih Temple: Bali's Mother Temple, Decoded
More than twenty temples terraced up an active volcano. What each one is, whether you need a guide, what it costs in time, and how Besakih survived 1963.
Read the guide →Temple
Tirta Gangga: The Water Palace With the Stepping Stones
Tirta Gangga is a royal water garden in east Bali, not a temple and not Tirta Empul. The stepping stones, the koi, the pools, and how to plan the day.
Read the guide →The dress code, the sarong and the rules on the sign
These are working places of worship with a ticket desk attached, not monuments. Almost everything expected of you costs nothing and takes about four seconds to arrange.
The gate check
Tap a part of the body to see what is actually required, and who provides it. Nothing here is complicated, and getting it right costs nothing.
The sarong, for everyone
A rectangle of cloth wrapped around the waist and falling below the knee, worn by men and women alike and worn over whatever you already have on. Shorts underneath are fine, and nobody minds. What is not accepted is bare legs, and that is the one rule enforced at the gate rather than merely printed on a sign.
Who provides it
Lent or rented at the entrance of practically every visitor temple, and included in the ticket at most of them.
The rules on the entrance sign
Three of these are firm and the rest are manners. Open one to see why it exists, which is the part that makes it stick.
This one surprises almost every visitor and it is written on the entrance sign at most major temples, in English. It follows from the Balinese concept of sebel, a state of ritual impurity that also applies to anyone with an open wound, to a woman who has recently given birth, and to a family in mourning. Nobody checks and nobody asks. It is a genuine religious rule rather than a formality, and knowing it exists is the point.
Who actually gives you the sarong
At practically every temple set up for visitors, the sarong and sash are handed to you at the entrance, and at most of them the cost is already inside the ticket. Where it is not, the rental is small change and the cloth comes back on the way out. Nobody is going to turn you away for arriving in shorts; they are going to hand you a piece of fabric and point at the changing area.
Buying your own is still worth doing if temples are a theme of your trip. A sarong and sash from any market cost roughly what a coffee does, they dry in ten minutes, they save you the queue at the borrowing desk, and they do not look like the fluorescent one-size-fits-nobody cloth every other visitor in the courtyard is wearing. It also removes the small awkwardness of wearing something a hundred strangers wore that week.
One caveat on the borrowed cloth. At sites where thousands pass through daily, the rental sarongs come back damp and are reissued immediately. If that bothers you, bring your own. If it does not, nobody has ever come to harm from a temple sarong.
Every single person in this frame is in a sarong handed out at the gate. The colours are how you tell the rentals from the ones people own.
Living sanctuaries and photo sets
Every temple on an itinerary sits somewhere on a line between a place where people pray and a place where people queue. Knowing which you are walking into is most of the difference between a good visit and a disappointed review.
At the living end sits Besakih, where more than twenty temples share one enclosure on the flank of Mount Agung and ceremonies run most weeks of the year. It is the mother temple, the holiest site in Balinese Hinduism, and when the volcano erupted in 1963 the lava passed within metres of the complex without touching it, an event most Balinese read as unambiguous. If you have heard that Besakih is a gauntlet of aggressive fake guides, that reputation is out of date: the site has been reorganised around a proper visitor centre with official guides, and the old car park hustle has largely gone with it.
Also at that end, Tirta Empul, where the purification ritual at the spouts is performed by Balinese families continuously, not as a demonstration. Foreigners may join, and it is genuinely moving to do so, provided you go in the first hour and enter the water in the right order rather than treating a thousand-year-old spring as a swimming pool.
At the other end is the Gates of Heaven. Lempuyang is one of the six great sanctuaries of the island and deeply important, and yet the overwhelming majority of people up there are queueing for a single photograph in front of a single gate. The mirror-still lake in that image does not exist: a temple photographer holds a piece of mirrored glass a few centimetres under the lens. Nothing is concealed about it, and nothing is ever mentioned about it in the captions either.
Tanah Lot and Uluwatu sit in the middle and lean towards spectacle. Both were founded in the sixteenth century and both are real, but you approach Tanah Lot through a long commercial arcade and Uluwatu is organised around a nightly kecak performance in a clifftop amphitheatre. That is not a criticism. It is simply a different evening out from the one Besakih offers on a Tuesday morning.
Besakih on an ordinary morning. Offerings arrive on foot, carried on the head, all day, at a site most visitors treat as a viewpoint.
How to tell before you go
Two questions settle it. Is there one famous photograph of this place? If yes, expect the site to be organised around producing that photograph for several thousand people a day. Does the inner court have anyone in it? If you can see worshippers sitting in white and gold beyond the second gate, you are in a working temple, and your behaviour matters more than your camera settings.
Both can be true at once, which is exactly the case at Lempuyang and at Tirta Empul. The point is not to avoid the popular ones, it is to arrive knowing which half of the place you are standing in.
Entrance fees, donations and the guide question
Small amounts of money change hands at several points, and knowing in advance which of them are official removes essentially all of the friction.
At the ticket desk
A few euros, sarong included
Official, printed, and normally covering the cloth. Rates are set locally and revised without warning, so treat every figure you read online as an order of magnitude.
In the car park
Parking, and sometimes a shuttle
A token amount for the car nearly everywhere. At Lempuyang and at Besakih a shuttle over the last stretch is a genuine, non-optional part of how the site is run.
The donation box
Real, and genuinely optional
Village temples with no ticket keep a box and a book. A small note is normal and adequate. Where somebody stands over the book pointing at large figures other visitors supposedly gave, ignore the figures.
Guides
Worth it twice out of nine
Besakih, because the complex needs explaining, and Tirta Empul, because the ritual has an order. Everywhere else you are buying company, and the price should be agreed before you set off.
The honest summary is that Bali temples are cheap. The entrance to the most sacred site on the island costs less than a beer at a beach club in Seminyak. What costs real money is the car: a driver for a full day east or north is several times the sum of every ticket you will buy, which is why grouping temples geographically matters far more than comparing their fees.
Bring cash in small notes. Card readers exist at the larger ticket offices and fail regularly, the shuttle drivers and the car park attendants are cash only, and nobody at any temple on Bali has change for a large note first thing in the morning.
How to group them without wasting the day
Bali is small on a map and slow on the road. The temples that look close together often are not, and the ones nobody pairs sometimes sit twenty minutes apart. Plan by direction: pick one bearing out of your base and stay on it.
Around Ubud
A half day
Tirta Empul first thing, before the coaches, then Gunung Kawi ten minutes up the same road or Goa Gajah on the way back. The Tegallalang terraces sit on the same axis if you want scenery rather than a third temple.
East Bali
A long day
Lempuyang at dawn for the gate and the mountain, Tirta Gangga mid-morning, then Besakih on the way back west. From the south this is twelve hours. Sleeping in Amed or Candidasa the night before turns it into a good morning.
West and the lakes
On the way north
Taman Ayun and Ulun Danu Beratan sit on the same road up to Bedugul, about forty minutes apart. This is the one genuinely efficient temple pairing on the island, and the Munduk waterfalls are the natural third stop.
The south
An afternoon
Uluwatu on the cliffs for the sunset and the kecak, or Tanah Lot on the coast for the same hour in a different register. Do one or the other, never both: they are ninety minutes apart and the sun sets once.
Two is usually the right number
Three temples in a day is possible and rarely enjoyable. The driving between them eats the time you came for, and by the third one you stop looking at anything. If a tour is selling you five, what it is really selling is five car parks. The exception is the eastern circuit, where Lempuyang, Tirta Gangga and Besakih genuinely do line up on one route, and even then it is a dawn-to-dusk commitment.
When to go, down to the hour
The hour matters more than the month, and the Balinese ritual calendar matters more than either if your dates happen to collide with it.
The hour
Doors open around six. The first two hours are cooler, emptier, and the light comes in low across the courtyards instead of straight down into them. Organised tours arrive between nine and eleven, which is also when the highland cloud closes in and when the queue at Lempuyang reaches three hours. The sunset temples invert all of this.
The season
The dry season, roughly April to October, gives you the clear mornings that make Agung visible from the eastern temples. The wet season brings afternoon downpours rather than all-day rain, and the sites are emptier and greener. Mountain temples make their own weather in any month.
The calendar
Bali runs a 210-day ritual year alongside the Gregorian one. Every temple celebrates its own odalan, its anniversary, on that cycle, and Galungan and Kuningan come round roughly twice per calendar year and fill the island with decorated bamboo poles.
A ceremony is the best and worst thing that can happen
Arriving at a temple during its odalan is the version of Bali people spend a fortnight hoping to stumble into: the compound full, the gamelan going, offerings stacked a metre high, everyone in white and gold. It is also the day access can be restricted or closed entirely at an hour's notice, which is expensive if you have driven three hours for it.
There is no reliable public calendar for this. Your driver will know, or will ring somebody who does, which is one of several arguments for hiring one rather than a scooter for temple days in the east.
Nyepi, the one date that stops everything
The Balinese new year, in March in most years, is a full day of silence. No flights land, no vehicles move, no lights show after dark, and nobody leaves their accommodation, visitors included. Every temple is shut and so is everything else.
The evening before is the opposite: the ogoh-ogoh parades, enormous demon effigies carried through every village and then burned. If your dates include Nyepi, plan a hotel you are happy to be confined to and treat the day as part of the trip rather than a day lost from it.
Bali temples: common questions
Dress code, fees, etiquette and how to choose between them.
Which is the most famous temple in Bali?
What are the famous temples in Bali?
Why does Bali have so many temples?
How many temples should you visit in Bali?
What do you wear to a temple in Bali?
Can women visit Bali temples while menstruating?
What is the most famous water temple in Bali?
Do you have to pay to enter Bali temples?
Do you need a guide for Bali temples?
What is the best time of day to visit a Bali temple?
Can you enter a Balinese temple as a non-Hindu?
Is Bali a Hindu island?
Elsewhere on the island
Ubud
The base for the interior, and the closest town to half the temples on this page.
Bali waterfalls
The other reason to drive inland, and a better afternoon than a third temple.
Tegallalang rice terrace
The downstream end of the subak system the water temples administer.
Nusa Penida
The cliff island off the south-east coast, and whether it is worth the day trip.