Places to Visit in Munroe Island

Munroe Island — Mundrothuruthu to the people who live there — is not a single island but eight major islands and an uncounted number of smaller islets, stitched together by narrow water-channels across roughly 13.4 square kilometres of the delta where the Kallada River meets the vast Ashtamudi Lake in Kollam district. It is a place best measured not in kilometres but in the slow dip of a paddle, in the way morning mist lifts off still water and coconut palms lean out over channels barely wider than a country boat.

The signature experience here is the canal cruise by canoe. The inner waterways — called thodu locally — are far too slender for the big houseboats that ply Alappuzha and Kumarakom, and that narrowness is exactly the point. A small wooden canoe, poled or paddled by a local boatman, slips beneath low bridges and overhanging branches into a green tunnel of mangroves and palm, past homes whose front steps drop straight into the water. The quiet is almost complete: birdsong, the drip of the paddle, the occasional splash of a fish. DTPC Kollam runs its cruises twice daily, at 9 am and 2 pm, covering about ten kilometres of canal in roughly two hours; homestays and independent boatmen run their own trips at dawn and in the golden hour, which is where the familiar advice about early light comes from.

One detail on that trip is worth watching for, because it is the island's condition written into its architecture. Many houses here carry an open extra storey on top — a bare upper platform under a roof, unwalled, apparently unfinished. It is not unfinished. When the water comes up, that is where the household and its possessions go. A visitor reads it as a half-built house; it is a flood plan.

Village life is woven right into the tour rather than staged for it. Along the banks you may see women beating and spinning coir — the golden fibre extracted from coconut husk — while men mend nets, build boats, or tend small paddy plots and prawn ponds. Ducks paddle in file, cattle graze thin strips of bund between water and field, and children wave from jetties. Many families here have earned their living from the water and the coconut for generations, and a Munroe Island cruise is as much a glimpse of that amphibious way of life as it is a nature outing.

The wider setting is Ashtamudi — the eight-armed lake — Kerala's second-largest estuary after Vembanad and a Ramsar-listed site, so the islands sit within genuinely rich birding country. Egrets, kingfishers, herons, cormorants and, in season, migratory visitors work the shallows and mangrove fringes. Slow, engine-free canoes make Munroe one of the calmer places in the state to simply drift and watch water birds go about their day (best confirmed with a local guide for the current season).

It is also worth correcting the picture of a uniformly flat, low-lying island, because the survey sheets say otherwise. About 58% of Munroe Island's land sits within five metres of mean sea level, and the railway platform is at one metre — but the highest point, Peringalam hill, reaches 21.8 metres, and the geomorphology here is formally classified as denudational hills and valleys as well as flood plains and wetlands. There is a hill on Munroe Island. Almost nothing written about the place mentions it, and Peringalam is also one of the two islets whose land loss has been measured most precisely.

Because there are no big hotels, most visitors stay in family-run homestays scattered across the islets, sharing simple, often superb Kerala home-cooking — fresh fish, prawns from the very ponds you paddled past, coconut in everything. Evenings settle into a deep, unhurried quiet, the kind that has largely vanished from busier backwater towns. Sunset over the open water of Ashtamudi, watched from a jetty or a slow canoe, is the day’s natural finale.

The backwaters here come alive for the Kallada boat race (Kallada Jalotsavam), a regatta of twelve snake boats — five of them A-grade iruttukuthi — run since 1969 on the straight stretch of the Kallada, the nettayam, at Munroe Thuruthu. The date is precise and often misreported: it is held on the 28th day of the Onam season, the day known locally as 28-aam Onam, which falls in the Malayalam month of Kanni — late September or October, not during Onam week in August–September. Kerala Tourism calls it the final boat race of the Kerala season. If you plan around Onam you will miss it by about a month. It is a rare burst of noise and colour in a place whose ordinary register is stillness — and, for many travellers, the surest sign that Munroe Island, for all its fragility, remains a living, working community rather than a museum of itself.

Legend & myth

Almost everything a visitor is told about why Munroe Island is going under is wrong, and the corrections are more interesting than the story they replace. The island did not start sinking in 2004. The sea is not the thing taking it. And the most closely studied question here — whether the land itself is subsiding at all — has been answered twice, in opposite directions, by scientists at the same institute.

Start with the tsunami, because it is the version most often repeated. Satellite imagery spanning 1960 to 2021 shows the degradation beginning in the 1980s, and residents date the serious trouble to around the year 2000. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami arrives at the end of that sequence. The 2023 Scientific Reports paper by Rafeeque and colleagues at the National Centre for Earth Science Studies names two causes in its conclusion and the tsunami is neither of them: the loss of freshwater and sediment from the Kallada after the Thenmala reservoir was built, and uncontrolled sand mining. The tsunami appears in other people's lists of causes, and that is where it belongs — attributed and dated out, not stated as fact.

Now the tide, which is the more surprising correction. Every account of this island tells you it floods at spring tide and advises planning around the tide table. The NCESS team tested that directly, with three tide gauges at four locations across three seasons, and found that the inland tidal range is almost the same at spring tides as at neap — that the tidal flooding at Munroe Island is not related to the ocean's spring tide at all. A one-metre spring tide at the open coast arrives here, 10.5 kilometres inland, at less than half that height. In the words of K.K. Ramachandran, who led the earlier study: even at the highest spring tide, they found that it does not flood. The team also tested whether the shape of the basin had changed, comparing bathymetric surveys from 2000 and 2017, and eliminated that too. Two candidate explanations measured and ruled out.

What the measurements do show is a river that has dug itself a trench. The Kallada's channel has deepened from 5–6 metres in the 1980s to about 14 metres now — roughly a tripling in one human generation — as sand mining removed riverbed material that the dammed river no longer replaces. And the ground the island sits on is not ground in any reassuring sense: boreholes found more than 120 metres of unconsolidated loose sediment below the surface, medium-to-high-compressibility clay with unconfined compressive strengths of 9 to 34.5 kilonewtons per square metre. This is not an island resting on rock. It is 120 metres of soft mud.

Which brings the two studies into collision. In 2019, after two years of satellite radar interferometry and a continuously monitoring array of GPS stations, NCESS concluded that the land, as such, is not subsiding — that what is going down is heavy, poorly engineered concrete buildings pressing into fluidised mud, some by a foot to a foot and a half. In 2023, the same institute published a paper describing land subsidence and measuring 14% of the island's area lost. Both agree the ocean tide does not explain the flooding and the basin's shape has not changed. They disagree on whether the island itself is settling, or only what has been built on it. Ramachandran's own summary of the open question is the most honest sentence anyone has published about this place: it is not the tide alone, it is not accelerated sea level, all of these must be contributing, but there is something happening within the Ashtamudi lake — some kind of internal resonance which we are yet to decode.

Two smaller cautions, both checkable. The 2023 paper states the panchayat's area as 13,400 hectares, or 134 square kilometres; Munroe Thuruthu is about 13.4 square kilometres, so that is a factor-of-ten slip inside a peer-reviewed paper, and the figure should not be repeated. And the widely circulated prediction that the island will be underwater by 2050 has no named scientist attached to it anywhere we can find. The practical upshot for a visitor is simple and runs against the standard advice: do not plan your trip around a tide table. Plan around the monsoon, and ask locally on the day.