Mahakuta Temples

Two clusters of 7th- to 12th-century sandstone temples standing at the water’s edge of Agastya Lake — the main Bhutanatha group on the east bank and the Mallikarjuna group to the north — among the most photographed lakeside temple scenes in the Deccan.

The green tank cradled between the two sandstone hills of Badami, ringed by steps and shrines and sacred to the sage Agastya; its water mirrors the cave temples on one cliff and the Bhutanatha temples on the far shore.

Four 6th-century rock-cut cave temples carved into the red sandstone cliff above Agastya Lake at Badami, the old Chalukyan capital of Vatapi — caves 1 to 3 are Hindu, with the great Nataraja, Trivikrama, Harihara and Narasimha reliefs and richly carved ceilings, while cave 4 is Jain.

The Chalukyan hill forts crowning the sandstone bluffs on either side of Badami, reached by rock-cut stairways past bastions, granaries and the Upper and Lower Shivalaya temples, with wide views over the caves, the lake and the town.

The temple of the goddess Banashankari (Shakambhari), tutelary deity of the Chalukyas, about 5 km from Badami at Cholachagudda; the present Vijayanagara-style shrine fronts a large stepped tank (Haridra Tirtha) and draws huge crowds at the Banashankari Jatre in the Hindu month of Pushya.

The UNESCO-listed group of 8th-century royal temples on the Malaprabha where the Chalukya kings were consecrated — a showcase of both Nagara (north Indian) and Dravida (south Indian) styles, led by the great Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna temples with the Sangameshwara and the Jain Narayana temple.

One of the earliest experimental temples at Aihole — a low, flat-roofed pillared hall of the 5th to 7th centuries that borrowed its plan from timber assembly-halls, later occupied by a Muslim named Lad Khan whose name stuck; a keystone in the study of how the Indian temple evolved.

The most celebrated temple of Aihole — an apsidal, gallery-wrapped 7th- to 8th-century shrine (its name comes from the durga, or fort, beside it, not the goddess) whose carved niches of Durga, Vishnu, Shiva and Harihara are landmarks of early Chalukyan sculpture.

The ASI museum beside the Durga temple complex, displaying Chalukyan sculpture, hero-stones and inscriptions gathered from Aihole’s 120-odd temples — a useful orientation to the "cradle of Indian temple architecture".

The sacred confluence (kudala-sangama) of the Krishna and Malaprabha rivers in Hungund taluk — the Sangameshwara temple and the Aikya Mantapa marking the samadhi of the 12th-century reformer Basavanna make it the foremost pilgrimage centre of the Lingayat (Sharana) faith.

Karnataka’s first sanctuary set aside for the chinkara (Indian gazelle), notified in 2016 across the scrub and rocky hills of the Bilagi and Mudhol taluks; it also shelters Indian wolf, striped hyena, jackal and blackbuck in a dry-country habitat unlike the state’s Ghats reserves.