Updated August 2026
Tirta Empul Temple
A spring that has been running since the tenth century, a queue of people waiting to stand under it, and the one temple near Ubud where something is actually happening rather than being photographed.
Tirta Empul is built around a spring that rises inside the temple grounds and has never stopped running. The water is channelled into long rectangular pools and out through a line of carved stone spouts, and Balinese Hindus come to stand under them and be purified. Not on holidays. On a Tuesday, before work, with the children.
That is what separates it from every other stop on a standard Ubud itinerary. Most of the island's famous temples are architecture you look at. This one is a rite you can join, which is also why turning up at eleven behind four coaches gets you something quite a lot worse than what you came for.
This page covers the part almost nobody writes down: what you actually do in the water, in what order, and the two fountains you walk past without stopping. Then the practical layer, the dress code, the drive, the cost, and the honest answer to whether a non-Hindu should be in the pool at all.
With a guide who explains the rite
Free cancellationTirta Empul purification tours from Ubud
- ✓A guide who tells you which spouts to skip, which is the whole difficulty
- ✓Offering, bathing sarong and locker usually handled for you at the gate
- ✓Normally combined with Tegallalang or Gunung Kawi on the same loop
- ✓Free cancellation on most listings, useful in the wet season
Affiliate link. Booking through GetYourGuide costs you nothing extra and supports the guide. Prices are indicative and vary by option and season.
The verdict in 30 seconds
- Go at opening. Around dawn it is worshippers and quiet water. By mid-morning it is a queue with a temple attached.
- You do not have to get in. Watching from the edge is entirely normal and nobody will push you.
- Two spouts are for funerary rites. Walk past them. This is the one thing worth knowing before you step into the pool.
- Twenty five minutes north of Ubud, which makes it the easiest serious temple to reach from town, and the one every tour bus can also reach.
What Tirta Empul actually is
A spring, a legend about poisoned water, and a thousand years of people queueing at the same fountains.
The name means holy water spring, and the spring is the reason for everything else. It rises in a clear pond in the innermost courtyard, bubbling up through sand at a rate that has not visibly changed in living memory, and the temple was built around it rather than the other way round. From that pond the water is fed downhill into the bathing pools, out through the carved spouts, and eventually into the Pakerisan river below.
The founding story is one of the better ones. A tyrant king, Mayadenawa, is said to have poisoned a stream to destroy the army sent against him, and the god Indra struck the ground to release a spring of amerta, the water of immortality, which revived the dying soldiers. That spring is this one. Whatever you make of the story, a stone inscription found nearby dates the temple to the tenth century, which puts its use somewhere around a thousand years of continuous worship.
It has never become a museum. Water is still drawn from here and carried to other temples for their own ceremonies, the compound closes for major rites, and the people beside you in the queue are not performing anything for your benefit. That is worth holding onto when the car park is full of minibuses.
Three courtyards
Like most Balinese temples it is laid out in three parts: an outer courtyard you walk through, a middle one holding the bathing pools, and the inner sanctum with the spring and the shrines. The pools are not the innermost part, which surprises people.
More than one pool
The photographs always show the same long pool, but there is a second bathing pool beyond it with fewer spouts and far fewer people. Groups on a schedule rarely reach it.
A palace on the hill
The building looking down over the temple is Istana Tampaksiring, a presidential retreat put up under Sukarno in the 1950s. It is not open to casual visitors, but it explains the manicured lawn above the spring.
How the melukat ritual works, step by step
Nearly every English-language page describes the pools and stops there. The rite has a shape, and knowing it is the difference between taking part and getting wet in a queue.
The melukat ritual, step by step
Leave your shoes, change into a bathing sarong
Two different sarongs are involved and people mix them up. The one handed to you at the ticket desk is the dry sarong you wear to walk around the compound. For the water you want a second one, rented for a small amount near the changing rooms, because you are going to be soaked in it. Changing rooms and lockers sit right by the pools. Leave your shoes on the rack, leave your phone in the locker or with whoever is not going in.
What you do
Rent the bathing sarong. Wear swimwear underneath it.
What gets you a look
Getting into the water in the temple's dry sarong, or in a bikini alone.
The row of spouts, left to right
Schematic, not a count: the number of spouts varies between the pools and the two funerary ones sit towards the end of the main row. What matters is the direction of travel and the fact that two of them are not yours to use.
The two spouts you walk past
This is the detail that matters most and the one the guidebooks leave out. Two of the fountains in the main pool are used for funerary rites, the cleansing performed in connection with a death, and they have nothing to do with the purification you came for. Balinese worshippers do not stop at them. Visitors who do not know often work along the whole row like a set of shower heads, which is not offensive so much as conspicuous.
They are usually marked with a sign, but signs weather and get moved. The reliable method is to watch the person in front of you. When the line steps around a fountain without pausing, step around it too. Following the queue is not just good manners here, it is the actual instruction.
Should a non-Hindu take part at all?
It is a fair question and worth asking. Melukat is open to non-Hindus, temple staff hand you a bathing sarong without hesitation, and Balinese people in the queue are generally welcoming about it. This is not a closed rite being intruded upon, and the temple has organised itself around visitors taking part.
What changes the answer is how you do it. Entering quietly, keeping the order, buying an offering and leaving the phone in the locker is participating. Queue-jumping to the photogenic spout while a family waits, or having a friend film you from the bank for ten minutes, is not, and it is the single most common complaint you will hear from Balinese visitors about this temple.
Tirta Empul is not Tirta Gangga
People book the wrong driver over this, then spend three hours in a car arriving at the wrong side of the island.
Both names begin with tirta, which simply means holy water, and there the similarity ends. One is a tenth century purification temple twenty five minutes north of Ubud. The other is a royal water garden from the 1940s in Karangasem, the far east of Bali, with the stepping stones over a koi pond that half the people searching for Tirta Empul actually have in mind. They are three hours apart by road and they are not a pair.
Which one did you actually mean?
Both names begin with tirta, which means holy water, and that is where the resemblance ends. Pick whichever line above sounds like your trip.
When to go, and how bad the crowds get
The site does not change through the day. Everything that makes it worth visiting does.
Tirta Empul is close enough to Ubud to be on every day tour, and that is the whole problem with it. From around ten in the morning the car park fills with minibuses, and the main pool turns into a slow-moving line of visitors in green sarongs with a handful of worshippers trying to get through it. Nothing about that is unpleasant, exactly. It is just not what the place is.
Come within the first hour of opening and you get the version people describe afterwards: mist on the surface, families arriving with offerings, and enough space in the row to take your time under each spout. The difference between eight in the morning and eleven is the difference between a ritual and a queue. Late afternoon is the second-best window, once the tours have moved on to lunch and the light drops behind the trees.
Balinese calendar days are a separate calculation. On full moon, purnama, and on other auspicious dates the temple fills with hundreds of worshippers in white, which is extraordinary to witness and hopeless if you wanted a quiet bathe yourself. Ask your driver or your hotel what the Balinese calendar says for the day you are planning, because no international calendar will tell you.
| Arrival window | Who is in the water | Wait for the row | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| First hour of opening | Mostly Balinese worshippers | Little to none | The reason to come. Worth the early start out of Ubud. |
| Mid morning | First tour groups, mixed | Fifteen to thirty minutes | Still workable if you head for the second pool first. |
| Late morning to early afternoon | Coach parties, wall to wall | Up to an hour | The window that produces the bad reviews. Avoid it. |
| Last two hours before closing | Locals again, few tourists | Short | The overlooked slot. Softer light, cooler water, calm. |
| Full moon and ceremony days | Hundreds of worshippers in white | Long, or the pools are closed to visitors | Remarkable to watch, wrong day to bathe yourself. |
Getting there from Ubud, Canggu or the south
It sits at Tampaksiring, in the hills above Ubud, on the road that continues towards Kintamani and the volcano.
| Coming from | Drive | Leave by, for opening | Sensible pairing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubud centre | 25 to 40 min | 07:00 | Gunung Kawi, then Tegallalang on the way back |
| Sanur | 1 h 15 | 06:30 | Add a waterfall south of Ubud on the return |
| Canggu, Seminyak | 1 h 30 to 2 h | 06:00 | Make it a full day with Ubud itself |
| Kuta, airport | 1 h 45 to 2 h 15 | 05:45 | Long day. Better done from an Ubud base |
| Kintamani, Mount Batur | 45 min | On the way down | Classic stop after a sunrise trek |
Private driver
The normal answer, and the reason is timing. A driver for a half day out of Ubud costs a few tens of euros for the car, not per person, and he waits while you queue and change. Ask for a seven in the morning start and be specific about it, because the default itinerary every driver runs puts Tirta Empul in the middle of the day.
Scooter
Genuinely fine from Ubud. The road north is sealed, reasonably wide and busy enough to be predictable, and there is proper parking at the temple. You will be carrying a wet sarong home, so bring a dry bag. Not something to attempt from the southern beaches on a whim.
Grab and Gojek
Works to get there from Ubud, works badly for the return. Coverage thins out at Tampaksiring and you can wait a long time for a car back, which is why most people who arrive by app end up negotiating with a driver in the car park at a worse rate.
Tickets, dress code and what it costs
Entrance fees at Balinese temples are set locally and revised without notice, so what follows is orders of magnitude rather than a price list.
| What you pay for | Detail | Order of magnitude |
|---|---|---|
| Entrance | Per adult, dry sarong and sash included. Children pay less. Cash. | A few euros |
| Bathing sarong | Rented separately near the pools. Only if you are going in. | A euro or two |
| Locker | Worth it. There is nowhere dry to leave a phone otherwise. | Around a euro |
| Offering | A canang of flowers, sold at the entrance. Optional, and expected if you are taking the rite seriously. | Small change |
| Parking | Car or scooter, collected on the way out. | Small change |
| Driver, half day from Ubud | Per car, not per person, and usually covering two or three stops. | A few tens of euros |
The dress code, in practice
Shoulders and knees covered anywhere inside the compound, with the sarong and sash you are given at the ticket desk worn over whatever you arrived in. This is enforced at the gate, not as a formality. Sleeveless tops, short shorts and swimwear as outerwear are the three things that get people sent back.
For the water, the working combination is swimwear underneath and a rented bathing sarong over the top, with a t-shirt if you would rather. Women bathe in a sarong tied at the chest, which is what the green ones in every photograph are. Men wear a sarong at the waist and go bare chested, which is normal here and only here.
Bring a towel, a full change of dry clothes and a bag for the wet ones. Flip flops are fine and you will be carrying them at some point anyway. Leave anything valuable in the locker, because the pool floor is stone and things that go in do not come out.
Two rules that are not negotiable
Menstruation. Balinese custom does not permit menstruating women inside temple grounds, and it is stated on signs at the entrance. Nobody checks. It is left entirely to you, which is exactly why respecting it matters.
Open wounds and the water. The spring is clean where it rises, but the pools are shared by hundreds of people a day. Do not swallow the water, do not go under with an open cut, and give it a miss altogether if you have an ear infection.
The rest of the temple, which most visitors miss
Ninety percent of the photographs are taken at one pool. The compound is a good deal larger than that.
Above the pools, the jeroan holds the spring pond, the shrines and a row of gilded pavilions under enormous banyan trees. This is the religious heart of the site and it is almost always quieter than the water, because groups arrive on a clock and the clock says pools. Sit here for ten minutes after you have dried off and the visit reads completely differently.
On the way out you are funnelled through a souvenir market, which is unavoidable by design. Prices open high and nobody expects you to accept them. It is perfectly pleasant if you treat it as part of the walk rather than as an ambush, and a genuinely decent place to pick up a sarong of your own for the rest of the trip.
Facilities are better than at most Balinese temples: proper changing rooms, lockers, toilets, a warung or two and reliable parking. What there is not is shade over the queue, so a hat matters more than you would think for a visit that is mostly spent in water.
Tegallalang
The rice terraces are twenty minutes back down the road and pair with Tirta Empul on almost every driver's standard loop. Go to the terraces first if you want them before the coaches, temple second.
Gunung Kawi
Rock-cut royal shrines in a river valley, ten minutes away and from roughly the same century. Three hundred steps down and back, far fewer visitors, and the best companion piece to Tirta Empul on the island.
Waterfalls
Several sit between Tampaksiring and Ubud, so you can add one on the way back without doubling the day. You are already wet and already carrying a towel.
Campuhan Ridge
Back in Ubud, and the easy way to finish a morning that started at seven. Flat, open, and best in the same early light you used at the temple.
Where it sits among the other temples
Tirta Empul is the one you take part in. That is what separates it from the rest of the island's big temples, and it is worth knowing what the others actually offer before you fill a week with them. At Besakih, the mother temple on the slopes of Mount Agung, you walk a vast complex of courtyards you mostly cannot enter, and the draw is scale and position rather than participation. Ulun Danu Beratan is a photograph you take from a lakeside garden, in highland air a good ten degrees cooler than here.
If you have one temple day, this one and Lempuyang pull in opposite directions: a ritual you join at dawn near Ubud, or two hours of driving east for a gate and a queue. The rest of the shortlist is on the temples guide.
So is it worth it?
Yes, with one condition attached, and it is the same condition as Lempuyang: the hour you arrive decides everything. Tirta Empul at eight in the morning is one of the few places on Bali where a visitor can step into something that has been happening continuously for a thousand years and be welcomed into it. Tirta Empul at noon in August is a wet queue and a souvenir market, and people write both of those reviews about the same temple in the same week.
It is also the rare temple that rewards preparation rather than photography. Knowing the order of the spouts, knowing which two to pass, carrying an offering and leaving the phone in the locker costs nothing and changes the visit entirely. Most people arrive knowing none of it, which is precisely why the ones who do stand out in the queue for the right reasons.
If you only have room for one temple near Ubud, make it this one. If you have room for two, add Gunung Kawi down the road rather than driving three hours east for a water garden with a similar name.
Tirta Empul: common questions
Is Tirta Empul Temple worth visiting?
What is the purification ritual at Tirta Empul?
What should you wear to Tirta Empul Temple?
Do you have to get in the water at Tirta Empul?
Are Tirta Empul and Tirta Gangga the same place?
What is the significance of Tirta Empul Temple?
Which god is Tirta Empul associated with?
How much does it cost to enter Tirta Empul?
Can you drink the water at Tirta Empul?
Can you visit Tirta Empul on your period?
What are the opening hours at Tirta Empul?
How long do you need at Tirta Empul?
More temples
Bali temples
Which ones are worth the drive, the dress code, and how to combine them.
Tirta Gangga
The royal water garden in the east, and the one people confuse with this page.
Besakih
The mother temple on Mount Agung, and how to visit it without being fleeced.
Taman Ayun
The quiet royal temple in a moat, on the road north to the lakes.