Five years of nobody

There is a sentence missing from every account of this waterfall, and it is a fairly large one: for about five years, you could not go there.

The falls were closed to visitors and reopened in September 2024. They opened again for the 2026 season in June. Our own page, until now, published opening hours, a ticket price and a best-time-to-visit as though the gate had simply been standing open all along.

What is actually on the record

The reopening after roughly five years is reported for September 2024. Then, on 25 June 2026, Onmanorama reported the site open again for the season — and reported it explicitly alongside the restoration of access at Manalar and at Palaruvi. Entry was given as ₹60 for an adult and ₹30 for a child, with online booking available, a cap of 100 visitors an hour, trained guides, civil defence personnel and an ambulance on site, and the Forest Department warning about slippery rocks and strong undercurrents.

The same piece notes that turnout was modest, because the water was still low in late June.

Set that beside what we already publish about Palaruvi, thirteen and a half kilometres away: closed on 15 February 2026 because summer heat had reduced the flow, reopened on 25 May 2026 when the monsoon restored it. Fourteen weeks shut, in the dry season, which is the opposite of what every travel site tells you about Kerala waterfalls.

So within about a month in the summer of 2026, one forest administration brought three waterfalls in this belt back into service. That is a coherent story about how these sites are actually run — seasonally, deliberately, and with the closures unannounced anywhere a visitor would look.

The part nobody will tell you

Why did it close for five years?

We do not know, and we want to be plain about that rather than write around it. No source we have found states a reason — not the reopening reports, not the district tourism council, not the Forest Department.

The obvious candidates are obvious to everybody. Kerala's catastrophic floods of 2018 and 2019 closed a great many forest sites, some for years, and the pandemic closed the rest. A five-year gap ending in 2024 fits either or both. But fitting is not evidence, and we have none. If we wrote "closed after the 2018 floods" it would read perfectly plausibly, it would be repeated by other sites within a month, and it would be exactly the kind of confident invention that put a Thenmala eco-tourism framework on this page in the first place.

So: closed for about five years, reopened September 2024, reason not on the public record.

Why the gap matters to a visitor

Because it changes how much weight you can put on anything printed about this place. A site that has been shut for five of the last eight years accumulates a very long tail of stale information: prices from before the closure, timings from before the closure — in our case from 2002 — and cheerful descriptions of a quiet forest pool written by people who may not have been able to reach it for years.

It also explains the safety establishment. A hundred visitors an hour, guides, civil defence, an ambulance and a published warning about undercurrents is not the apparatus of a sleepy roadside cascade. It is what a department puts in place when it reopens a site it has been holding shut and expects a rush.

The practical advice follows from that. Do not plan a long drive here on the strength of any figure you read online, this page included. The road in is long — around 117 km from Kollam by the Achankovil approach — and the phone number DTPC publishes for the Forest Range Officer, +91 85476 00500, is the only direct line to the people who actually know whether the gate is open.