Luz Church

Nageswara Rao Park is a leafy neighbourhood park in Mylapore, popular for walking, shaded recreation and community cultural events in central Chennai. Named after freedom fighter and Amrutanjan founder K. C. Nageswara Rao Pantulu, who donated the land, it hosts open-air cultural events during the Mylapore festival. Its old trees make it one of the greener pockets of the temple district.

One of the oldest and most revered village goddess (Amman) temples in Mylapore, believed to predate much of the surrounding settlement. The deity is said to have appeared self-manifested amid mundaka (lily) plants in a pond, giving the temple its name. It remains a busy neighbourhood shrine especially during Aadi and Navratri.

A Dravidian-style Shiva temple in Mylapore whose origins are traditionally traced to the 7th-century Pallava period; the present structure was rebuilt in the 16th century under Vijayanagara (Tuluva-dynasty) patronage after the earlier seashore temple was lost. Shiva is worshipped here as Kapaleeshwarar and his consort Parvati as Karpagambal.

A neo-Gothic Roman Catholic minor basilica rebuilt by the British in 1893-1896, it is traditionally held to stand over the tomb of St. Thomas the Apostle and is one of only three churches in the world believed to be built over an apostle's tomb (alongside St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican and Santiago de Compostela in Spain).

The lighthouse at the southern end of Marina Beach, whose current 1977 tower is one of the few in India fitted with an elevator and open to the public for sweeping views over the city and the Bay of Bengal.

A Church of South India cathedral built between 1815 and 1816 on Cathedral Road, designed by Colonel James Caldwell and Thomas Fiott de Havilland in a graceful Neoclassical style with a tall steeple. Its spire was among the tallest structures in early 19th-century Madras. The churchyard holds colonial-era tombs and memorials.

A distinctive round building from the 1840s that was originally used to store ice imported by sea, giving it the name Ice House. Swami Vivekananda stayed here in 1897 after returning from the West; the Tamil Nadu government renamed it Vivekanandar Illam in 1963, and it is now a museum on Vivekananda and Indian culture run by the Ramakrishna Math.

Amir Mahal in Royapettah is the official residence of the Prince of Arcot, titular descendant of the Nawabs of the Carnatic. This Indo-Saracenic palace, adapted into a royal residence by Robert Chisholm in 1876, remains a working home with only limited public access.

A roughly 20-acre botanical garden opened in 2010 by the Tamil Nadu Horticulture Department in the heart of the city. It features themed sections, a glasshouse, and a wide variety of ornamental, medicinal, and exotic plants.

Built in 1810 by the Arcot Nawab Umdat ul-Umara, this multi-domed Shia mosque takes its name from an old tradition of lighting a thousand oil lamps to illuminate the assembly hall that once stood here. It is regarded as one of the largest mosques in the country and a major centre of azadari for Chennai's Shia community.

One of Chennai's oldest temples, this Dravidian-style Vishnu shrine in Triplicane is dedicated to Krishna as Parthasarathy, the charioteer of Arjuna. Attributed to the Pallavas and among the 108 Divya Desams, it enshrines five forms of Vishnu and is celebrated in the early-medieval Tamil hymns of the Alvar saints.

Also called the Big Mosque (Periya Palli), it was built in 1795 by the family of Nawab Wallajah Muhammad Ali Khan of the Carnatic, with the Nawab's mother funding its completion. Constructed of granite without steel or timber and topped by two tall minarets and domes, it is one of the oldest and grandest mosques in Chennai. It remains the principal congregational mosque of Triplicane.