Highlights
- The tortoise-shaped island.
- The hilltop Narasimha temple.
- Snorkelling and the annual jatra.
A tortoise-shaped island ~4 km off Karwar with a hilltop Narasimha temple, snorkelling and an annual jatra; reached by boat. This island guide is organized from Karwar in Uttara Kannada district, with practical planning for routes, timing, nearby stays, food, operators and direct local inventory. Use it to compare what to see, how long to spend, when to go and which homestays, boat operators, houseboats, canoe guides, restaurants and last-mile transfers should be verified around Kurmagad Island.
Kurmagad is a tortoise-shaped island about 4 km off Karwar, with a hilltop Narasimha temple.
It offers snorkelling and an annual jatra, and is reached by boat.
Road km to Uttara Kannada; ghat roads and traffic vary — allow extra.
The calm season when boats run — avoid the rough monsoon sea.
Live forecast loads in your browser.
Sunset is in about 2 hours.
Sun and moon are calculated for this location and shown in IST. Photography windows are the hour around sunrise and sunset; the sunset bearing is degrees clockwise from true north. Moon phase is accurate to about half a day.
Verified hotels, homestays, restaurants, experiences, sights, shops and rentals around Kurmagad Island — commission-free, with direct contact. Filter by what you need.
A small eating house near the Kali River Garden at Kodibag, at the north end of the town about forty minutes' walk from the centre. "Hotel" here means what it means all over coastal Karnataka — a plate-meals restaurant, not a place to sleep. Named for Annapurneshwari, the goddess of food, which on this coast usually signals a vegetarian kitchen; it publishes nothing, so check before you count on it.
A roadside restaurant on the Panvel–Kochi–Kanyakumari highway — NH-66 — at Kodibag, on the northern edge of town about half an hour's walk from the centre. A highway kitchen rather than a destination, and a straightforward stop if you are driving in from Goa. Nothing about its hours or menu is published.
A restaurant at Kodibag, beside the Indian Bank and near the Radha Krishna temple, and one of the closest eating houses to the town centre — about thirteen minutes on foot. OpenStreetMap carries the address; there is no website, no published menu and no hours we can vouch for.
A meat restaurant on KEB Road opposite the Sagar Complex, a quarter of an hour's walk from the town centre, and one of the handful of non-vegetarian kitchens in the middle of town. Karwar's cooking is Konkan and Goan more than Kannadiga — coconut, cashew and ginger in the gravy — and the everyday version of it is eaten in rooms like this rather than in hotels.
An eating house on INP Road at Baithkol, by the fishing harbour about fifty minutes' walk south of the town centre. Baithkol is where the catch actually lands — mackerel, sardine, seer, prawns, clams and crab — and the kitchens around the harbour road are the reason to be down there at all. Nothing about it is published; go and look.
A restaurant at the Mahalasa cross on the Karwar road, listed in OpenStreetMap with a Binaga and Ankola address — that is the stretch south of Karwar towards the naval base, not the town centre, and it is about 3.5 km out. Useful if you are already on that road; not somewhere to walk to from the beach.
A meat kitchen at Arga, on the coast road well south of the town — the same Arga whose beach went into naval property when the base at Binaga was built. About 9 km round from the town centre, so a drive rather than a walk. The trailing "a" in the name is how it is recorded in OpenStreetMap and is almost certainly a typing slip in the survey, not part of the name.
Book with the place itself. India’s cyber-crime coordination centre warned in April 2025 that convincing copies of hotel and pilgrimage booking sites are being pushed through sponsored search and social ads, taking payment for rooms the property never hears about. Every listing here links to the business’s own contact details and its own Google or Bing profile — we take no commission and sit in nobody’s payment path. If a booking page reached you through an ad, check the address bar against the property’s own site before you pay. Fraud can be reported on cybercrime.gov.in or on 1930.
Kurmagad Island sits in Karwar, and these rank everything verified across the town rather than this one spot — built from the same listings shown above, ordered by the strength of the source evidence behind each entry rather than by anyone's star score. Every card shows how many places are really on it. Nobody pays to appear.
3 more places around Karwar, each worth a day of its own.
4.1 km · ~10 min by auto
The long shallow town strand of Karwar under its headland, running south from the mouth of the Kali river — the evening promenade of the district headquarters, with fishing boats drawn up on the sand and the Western Ghats behind.
3.5 km · ~9 min by auto
A Sonda-era hill fort of 1715 above the mouth of the Kali river, about 5 km from Karwar, with the Shantadurga temple and a 17th-century dargah on the way up and the Arabian Sea and its islands below.
4.4 km · ~11 min by auto
Karwar’s main promenade beach, named for Rabindranath Tagore, who stayed here in 1882 and wrote a chapter of his memoirs about it — with the decommissioned missile boat INS Chapal preserved on the sand as a walk-through warship museum and a retired Tu-142 patrol aircraft beside it.
Roampedia is commission-free — own or know a stay, eatery, guide or shop near Kurmagad Island? List it and it appears here once verified.
Add a nearby businessEntry: Free island; boat charged
About 4 km off Karwar, reached by boat; arrange a local boat from Karwar
Work out your return before you settle in for the sunset. Public transport here thins out sharply in the evening, and Kurmagad Island is easier to reach than to leave. We do not publish departure times: there is no official live feed we are permitted to republish, and a wrong time here would strand you. Check the operator directly on the day.
Ask at the bus stand for the time of the last service back, not the next one. If you miss it, an auto or app cab is the fallback — agree the fare before you get in.
We have not assessed physical access at this place yet. Across India, step-free routes, handrails and accessible toilets are the exception rather than the rule, and pavements are often interrupted — if step-free access matters to you, contact the site or a local operator before committing to the trip.
Emergency numbers are verified against official government and state tourism sources. 112 works anywhere in India.
The calm season when boats run — avoid the rough monsoon sea.
Entry: Free island; boat charged. Timings: Boat trips by day; weather-dependent.
About 4 km off Karwar, reached by boat; arrange a local boat from Karwar. A boat trip and a short climb to the temple — wear a life jacket and check the sea.
Half a day with the boat.
Nearby you can pair Sadashivgad Fort (3.5 km), Karwar Beach (4.1 km), Tagore Beach & INS Chapal Museum (4.4 km), Gokarna Beach (39.6 km).
We have not published a story about Kurmagad Island itself yet. These cover Karwar, the town it sits in, and the wider district.
Kurmagad Island sits in Karwar, so these cover the streets, buildings and surroundings around it.


Route-level itineraries and practical guides for the rest of Karnataka.
Photographs: S5OKINFINITY, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Wikimedia Commons.