The reason Varkala has a cliff is that a ridge of old sediment meets the sea here. The reason that mattered to the nineteenth century is that the same ridge sat across the only sensible inland waterway on this coast. Kerala moved its goods by boat, the boats needed a continuous channel from Thiruvananthapuram northwards, and Varkala was in the way.
What they built
They went through it. Two tunnels were cut for the canal — the longer at Sivagiri, about 722 m, and a second at Chilakkoor, about 350 m, giving a total in the order of 1,070 m of bore. Work began in 1867 under the Travancore Diwan Sir T. Madhava Rao, with Walthew Clarence Barton as chief engineer, and finished around 1880, by which time the Diwan was Sheshayya Sastri. Some accounts give 1877 rather than 1880 for completion; we have found no source that settles it and print both.
Thirteen or fourteen years is a long time for a kilometre. This was hand work through sandstone and clay in a wet climate, for a princely state, in the same decades the same state was building its roads and its first railways. It is one of the more ambitious pieces of civil engineering Travancore attempted and it is almost entirely absent from the way Varkala is described today.
What it was for
The tunnels were the missing link in the Thiruvananthapuram–Shoranur canal, the inland waterway that ran the length of the coastal plain. Further south, the Parvathy Puthanar — sanctioned in 1824 under Rani Parvathy Bai — connected Thiruvananthapuram to the Kadinamkulam backwaters. Joining that system northwards past the Varkala ridge gave southern Travancore a continuous water road.
What moved along it was coir, rice and cashew, for close to a century. That is the part worth holding on to when you stand at the portal: this was not a scenic waterway or a royal folly. It was freight infrastructure, and it worked.
The tunnels, in figures
| Sivagiri bore | about 722 m |
| Chilakkoor bore | about 350 m |
| Total | about 1,070 m |
| Begun | 1867, under Diwan Sir T. Madhava Rao |
| Completed | about 1880 (some sources say 1877), under Diwan Sheshayya Sastri |
| Chief engineer | Walthew Clarence Barton |
| Officially closed | 2007 |
Why it stopped
Roads and railways, first. Once freight could go by lorry and by train, a canal that required a boat to be poled through a kilometre of tunnel stopped making commercial sense, and traffic fell away through the middle of the twentieth century. Then the ordinary fate of a disused channel: silt, weed, and building along and over the banks. It was officially closed in 2007, on grounds of siltation and encroachment.
There is periodic talk of restoring the waterway as part of the national inland waterway running up the Kerala coast, and periodic survey work to go with it. We are not going to tell you it is about to reopen. What is true today is that the portals are there, the water is there, and boats are not.
Going to look
- The north end is the more photographed portal and the easier to reach; the south end sits on the other side of the ridge.
- This is an abandoned canal in a residential area, not a maintained site. There is no path, no railing and no interpretation board.
- Do not enter the bore. It is unlit, silted, partly flooded and structurally unmonitored.
- It is a few minutes inland from the cliff strip and takes half an hour of your day, which is the best argument for it.
The thing that makes it worth the detour is the contrast. Everything about Varkala’s reputation is the cliff edge — cafés, sunsets, yoga, the sea. Fifteen minutes behind it is a piece of Travancore state engineering that took over a decade to cut, carried the region’s freight for generations, and now sits under weed with nobody looking at it. That is a more honest picture of what this town has been than the view from the cliff.