Varkala Cliff Section: What Is Actually Protected Here

Search for Varkala Cliff and you will be told, confidently and often, that it is India’s first geopark, or that UNESCO has granted it geopark status.

It has not. There is no UNESCO Global Geopark at Varkala, and there is no national geopark designation in India for it to have been first at. The claim appears to have started in tourism copy and hotel blogs and then done what such claims do.

Which is a shame, because the two things Varkala genuinely holds are better stories than the one it has been given.

The 2014 notification

In 2014 the Geological Survey of India notified this stretch of coast as a National Geological Monument. It was the 27th site on a list that now runs to 34, and its official name is gloriously unromantic: Varkala Cliff Section.

The word section is the whole point. In geology a type section is the reference exposure — the particular outcrop against which a rock formation is defined, the physical specimen the definition points at. Varkala is the type section of the Warkalli Formation. When a geologist anywhere writes about Warkalli beds, this cliff is what the term ultimately refers back to.

That is a considerably stronger claim than being scenic. Plenty of places are beautiful. Very few are the definition of something.

What the layers are

The face reads from the bottom up as a sequence of Mio-Pliocene sediments — very roughly the last several million years — laid down in an ancient coastal setting and now cut open by the sea.

Beneath, soft red and white sandstones and variegated clays. Running through them, dark carbonaceous seams carrying lignite, the young, crumbly precursor of coal, along with jarosite and marcasite and preserved plant microfossils, the pollen and spores that let the beds be dated. Over the top, the hard iron-rich lateritic cap, only a few metres thick, that keeps the whole thing standing.

Almost everyone describes Varkala as a laterite cliff. Strictly, the laterite is the lid. The protected scientific value is in the soft, layered, far older material underneath it — the part that would wash away in a season without the cap.

Kerala’s other one

Kerala has exactly two National Geological Monuments, and the second is a fine piece of symmetry.

It is at Angadipuram in Malappuram, and it is the type locality of laterite itself — the place where the surgeon Francis Buchanan first described the rock in 1807 and gave it its name, from the Latin later, a brick, because that is what the locals cut it into. Every use of the word laterite anywhere in the world traces back to a road cutting in Malabar.

So Kerala’s two protected geological sites are the place where laterite got its name, and the place where laterite is merely the roof over something older.

The 2025 listing

On 27 August 2025 the site did receive a genuine UNESCO milestone, though not the one it keeps being credited with. Natural Heritage of Varkala was entered on India’s World Heritage Tentative List, one of seven natural sites added together, taking India’s tentative entries from 62 to 69. The Archaeological Survey of India is the nodal agency.

A tentative list is a queue. It is the pool a state party draws from when it decides what to nominate, and entry on it records an intention, not an award. Sites sit on tentative lists for decades. Some never move.

It is still real, and it is dated, and it is the strongest formal recognition the cliff has yet received. It is simply not a World Heritage Site, and it is not a geopark.

Why the distinction is not pedantry

Because the protections are different, and the cliff needs them.

The thing that makes the exposure scientifically valuable — soft sediment held up by a thin hard cap — is exactly what makes it fragile. Cut into the cap, load the top, or change where water goes, and the material beneath behaves accordingly. Drainage, septic tanks and clifftop construction have all been flagged by geologists as destabilising, and the back-to-back Kerala floods of 2018 and 2019 are reported to have loosened the laterite further. Slumping and edge collapse have occurred.

A UNESCO Global Geopark, had it existed here, would carry a management framework and a four-yearly revalidation. Believing Varkala already has that protection is a way of not asking whether it has any.

What to notice when you are standing on it

Walk down to Papanasam and look back up at the face rather than out at the sea. The banding is legible from the beach: pale sandstone, darker clay seams, the red-brown cap along the top with vegetation rooted in it.

Then note where the cafés sit. They sit on the cap. The whole promenade is built on the few metres of hard rock that is holding up the thing it is there to look at.