Hampi

The story of Hampi

Hampi is the great ruined city spread around you, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose surviving monuments still include active worship at the Virupaksha Temple and an Adi Shankara-linked monastery. What makes it instantly striking is that this is not just an archaeological landscape: it is a place of ruined royal power and continuing religious life at the same time.

The site you are standing in was the capital of the Vijayanagara (Karnata) Empire from 1336 to 1565, when it was abandoned. It was a fortified city, and Persian and European travellers, especially the Portuguese, described it as prosperous, wealthy and grand, with numerous temples, farms and trading markets near the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world’s second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India’s richest, drawing traders from Persia and Portugal. That prosperity ended in 1565, when the capital was conquered, pillaged and destroyed by Muslim armies after the Vijayanagara Empire was defeated by a coalition of Muslim sultanates, and Hampi remained in ruins.

Long before the empire rose, Hampi was already a religious place. It is mentioned in the Ramayana and the Puranas of Hinduism as Pampa Devi Tirtha Kshetra, and its name comes from Pampa, the old name of the Tungabhadra River, through the Kannada name Hampe. The broader history of the site stretches back even further: Emperor Ashoka’s Rock Edicts in nearby Nittur and Udegolan suggest this region belonged to the Maurya Empire in the 3rd century BCE. Archaeologists have also found a Brahmi inscription and a terracotta seal dating to about the 2nd century CE. The town appears in Badami Chalukya inscriptions as Pampapura, from between the 6th and 8th centuries.

By the 10th century, the place had become a centre of religious and educational activity under the Kalyana Chalukyas, whose inscriptions say the kings made land grants to the Virupaksha temple. Several inscriptions from the 11th to 13th centuries mention gifts to goddess Hampa-devi. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, Hindu kings of the Hoysala Empire built temples to Durga, Hampadevi and Shiva here. Then, after the fall of the Kampili kingdom, the Vijayanagara Empire arose from its ruins in 1336. Britannica says the city and its first dynasty were founded that year by five sons of Sangama, with Harihara and Bukka as the first kings.

The remains around you cover 4,187.24 hectare, and UNESCO describes the wider landscape as an “austere, grandiose site” with more than 1,600 surviving remains. What you can see is not a single monument but a whole historic city: forts, riverside features, royal and sacred complexes, temples, shrines, pillared halls, mandapas, memorial structures, water structures and more. That scale helps explain why visitors kept writing about it. Niccolò de’ Conti gave the city a circumference of 60 miles, Abdul Razzaq described seven layers of forts, and Domingo Paes wrote that it was “as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight... the best provided city in the world”.

After the empire’s collapse, the area stayed contested through the 18th century, claimed by local chiefs, the Hyderabad Muslim nizams, the Maratha Hindu kings, and Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore. In 1799, Tipu Sultan was defeated and killed, and the region came under British influence. The ruins were surveyed in 1800 by Scottish Colonel Colin Mackenzie, who wrote that the site was abandoned and only wildlife lived there. Alexander Greenlaw photographed it in 1856.

Today Hampi is a State Protected Monument and remains open around the clock. Conservation work has included removing debris from a collapsed bridge, relocating a vehicular bridge outside the property, and plans to revive historic water systems flowing through the Virupaksha temple complex and Pushkarini. Flooding from annual release of water from the Tungabhadra dam is an increasing issue. If you look across the ruins here, keep an eye out for the contrast that defines Hampi: sacred sites still in use beside the broken remains of a capital that once drew merchants from Persia and Portugal.