Tourist Attractions in Varanasi

Explore the 5 best tourist attractions in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh that every traveler must visit. This list covers a wide range of attractions including hill stations, temples, monuments, and much more — so there's something for every kind of traveler.

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  Manikarnika Ghat

  Ghat in Varanasi

  Smoke rises here at every hour. It has done so for centuries, perhaps millennia, and it will continue tomorrow and the day after that. Manikarnika Ghat is where Hindus come to die — or more precisely, where they come to be burned after dying, sending their souls toward moksha, the release from the endless cycle of rebirth. This is not a sight for everyone. There is no museum here, no ticket booth, no gift shop hawking miniatures. What you'll find instead is the most honest piece of theatre on...
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  Assi Ghat

  Ghat in Varanasi

  At the southern edge of Varanasi, where the Assi rivulet once met the Ganges before the city reduced it to a trickle, sits the ghat that most visitors save for last and most pilgrims start with. Assi Ghat is the quieter cousin of Dashashwamedh — less theatrical, less crowded, and somehow more honest about what Varanasi actually is. You come here for sunrise. You stay for the strange, unhurried rhythm that the rest of the old city never quite allows. A boatman will offer you a ride before you'...
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  Dashashwamedh Ghat

  Ghat in Varanasi

  By six in the evening, the stone steps are already filling. Pilgrims press shoulder to shoulder with backpackers, sadhus in saffron rearrange their robes, and boatmen call up from the Ganges with prices that drop the longer you ignore them. Dashashwamedh Ghat is the loudest, most crowded, most relentlessly alive stretch of riverfront in Varanasi — and that's exactly the point. This isn't a place for quiet contemplation. It's a place where a city of three thousand years performs itself nightly...
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  Kashi Vishwanath Temple

  Temple in Varanasi

  The first thing you notice isn't the gold. It's the sound. A low, continuous current of Sanskrit chants, copper bells, bare feet on wet marble, and the murmured "Har Har Mahadev" that passes between strangers like a password. Kashi Vishwanath Temple sits a few hundred metres from the Ganges in the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, and it doesn't ease you in. It pulls you straight into the centre of something. Devotees believe a single visit here, paired with a dip in the river, can...
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  Banaras Hindu University

  University in Varanasi

  Walk through the southern gate of Banaras Hindu University on a winter morning, and the first thing that strikes you isn't the scale — though the scale is considerable, some 1,300 acres of it — but the quiet. After the relentless press of Varanasi's old city, where motorbikes and pilgrims and cows negotiate every square metre of broken pavement, BHU feels like a different country. Wide avenues lined with neem and gulmohar trees. Cyclists in long shadows. Students hunched over books on stone b...

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