Every write-up of Kappil Beach reaches for the same words. Hidden gem. Unspoilt. Untouched. A place where nothing happens.
Stand on the spit with the sea on one side and the lake on the other and it is easy to believe. It is also, on the lake side, quite wrong. That still green water is a trunk route, and it has been one since the 1860s.
Why Travancore dug canals
The Kerala coast has almost no natural harbours, and for a good part of the year the surf makes landing on an open beach genuinely dangerous. A kingdom that needed to move coir, rice, cashew and timber up and down its length had an obvious alternative: the chain of lagoons lying just behind the shoreline, sheltered from the sea by a few hundred metres of sand.
Link those lagoons and you have an inland highway that never sees a wave. That is what Travancore did. The result was the Thiruvananthapuram–Shoranur canal — the TS Canal — which today forms the spine of National Waterway 3, the West Coast Canal, running roughly 205 km from Kollam to Kottapuram.
The Edava–Nadayara backwater at Kappil is a link in that chain. Southward it connects toward Paravur lake by the Maniyamkulam canal; northward the system reaches Ashtamudi. It is not a pond with a pretty view. It is a section of road.
The problem at Varkala
The lagoon chain has one serious interruption, and you have already looked at it: the Varkala ridge, the same formation that gives the cliff its drama. A continuous waterway needs to get past it, and there is no way round.
So they went through. From 1867, under the Travancore Dewan Sir T. Madhava Rao, two tunnels were cut through the laterite — the Sivagiri tunnel at 722 m and the Chilakkoor tunnel at 350 m, a little over a kilometre of bore between them. The first opened to traffic in 1877; both were finished by about 1880. Fourteen years of work.
They were dug without modern drilling equipment, by hand, through rock, to float boats through a hill. It is the kind of nineteenth-century public work that would be a headline attraction almost anywhere else, and here it sits a few kilometres from a beach described as a place where nothing happens.
A century of traffic, then silence
For close to a hundred years the tunnels carried working boats: coir from the backwater villages, rice, cashew, the ordinary freight of a coast that moved on water.
Then roads and railways arrived and did what roads and railways do. The freight left the water. The canal silted, vegetation closed over the cuttings, and the tunnels — still there, still structurally the same holes through the same hill — stopped being infrastructure and became something people mentioned occasionally.
The photograph at the top of this piece was taken around 1900 by Zachariah D’Cruz, in the middle of that working century. The cutting is clean, the walls are dressed, the water is being used.
February 2026
On 26 February 2026 the Chilakkoor tunnel was reopened by the Chief Minister as part of the Akkulam–Chettuva Waterway. The restoration was carried out by Kerala Waterways Infrastructure Limited, a joint venture between the state government and Cochin International Airport Limited, and the original structure was kept rather than rebuilt.
What runs through it now is not cargo. It is 20-seat electric boats, with a light-and-sound presentation on Sree Narayana Guru’s connection to Varkala. Whether that is the right use of a Victorian freight tunnel is a fair question; that it is open at all, after a century, is the news.
What this changes about a visit to Kappil
Mostly it changes what you are looking at. The boat ride across the Edava–Nadayara is usually sold as a nature outing — herons, kingfishers, palms, reed beds, and it delivers all of that. But you are also boating on a canal, and the reason the water goes where it goes is that somebody surveyed it.
It is a better story than untouched, and it has the advantage of being true. The sand spit really is quiet. The lake behind it is a piece of working infrastructure that predates every road you used to get here.
Frequently asked questions
Is the water at Kappil natural or man-made?
Both. The Edava–Nadayara is a natural coastal lagoon, but it was linked into an engineered navigation system — the Thiruvananthapuram–Shoranur canal, now the spine of National Waterway 3 — which is why it connects continuously to Paravur lake in the south and Ashtamudi in the north.
Where are the Varkala tunnels and how big are they?
They run through the ridge beneath the Varkala cliff, a few kilometres south of Kappil: the Sivagiri tunnel at 722 m and the Chilakkoor tunnel at 350 m, a little over a kilometre in total.
When were they built, and by whom?
Construction began in 1867 under the Travancore Dewan Sir T. Madhava Rao. The first tunnel opened to traffic in 1877 and both were complete by about 1880 — roughly fourteen years of work, cut through laterite by hand without modern drilling equipment.
Can you go through the tunnel now?
The Chilakkoor tunnel was reopened on 26 February 2026 as part of the Akkulam–Chettuva Waterway, restored by Kerala Waterways Infrastructure Limited with 20-seat electric boats and a light-and-sound presentation. Check current operating arrangements locally before planning around it.
What did the canal actually carry?
Ordinary freight for this coast — coir, rice, cashew and timber — for close to a century, until road and rail took the traffic during the twentieth century and the waterway fell out of commercial use.
Why did Travancore build a canal instead of using the sea?
Because this coast has almost no natural harbours and the surf makes open-beach landing dangerous for much of the year. Moving goods through the sheltered lagoons behind the shoreline was simply safer than moving them along the coast.