Chennai: A City Guide to Madras by the Bay

Chennai — the former Madras — is the capital of Tamil Nadu and the great metropolis of India’s south-eastern coast, where the city meets the Bay of Bengal along a broad ribbon of sand. It is a place of two temperaments: a busy port and technology hub on one side, and on the other the custodian of Tamil high culture, from Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam dance to the daily ritual of strong, frothy filter coffee. This guide walks through the city’s essential sights, from its beaches and Dravidian temples to the colonial fort where British Madras began.

Along the Marina and the coast

The Marina is Chennai’s front room. This sweep of sand runs for about 13 km along the Bay of Bengal, from near Fort St George in the north to Besant Nagar in the south, and is generally described as the longest natural urban beach in India; some accounts rank it among the longest urban beaches in the world, though genuinely longer beaches exist elsewhere. Swimming is discouraged because of strong currents, but the Marina is made for walking, kite-flying and eating hot bhajji at dusk, with statues, memorials and the old Presidency-era buildings lining Kamarajar Salai behind it.

Further south, past the Adyar estuary, Elliot’s Beach at Besant Nagar is quieter and more local — a favourite evening haunt fringed with cafés and watched over by the small Karl Schmidt memorial, raised to a swimmer who drowned rescuing others. Together the two beaches bookend a coast that has shaped the city’s life for close to four centuries.

Temples and the old Mylapore quarter

Mylapore is the devotional and cultural heart of Chennai, and its centrepiece is the Kapaleeshwarar Temple, dedicated to Shiva as Kapaleeshwarar and his consort Parvati as Karpagambal. Built in the Dravidian style, the present temple dates largely from the 16th and 17th centuries, though the shrine’s origins reach back to Pallava times. Its towering eastern gopuram — rebuilt in 1906 and rising some 40 m in tiers of brightly painted deities — presides over the temple tank and the surrounding bazaar. The great annual event is the nine-day Panguni Peruvizha in March or April, when the Arupathimoovar procession carries images of the sixty-three Nayanar saints through the streets.

A short distance away, on the shore, stands San Thome Basilica, a neo-Gothic church rebuilt by the British in the 1890s over an earlier Portuguese shrine. By long tradition it marks the tomb of the Apostle Thomas, held to have preached in south India in the first century — one of only a handful of churches in the world believed to be built over an apostle’s grave. Inland at Triplicane, the Sri Parthasarathy Temple honours Krishna as Parthasarathy, the charioteer of Arjuna; founded by the Pallavas in the 8th century, it is one of the 108 Divya Desams sacred to Vaishnavites. Nearby, the early-19th-century Thousand Lights Mosque, raised by the Wallajah Nawabs of the Carnatic, takes its name from the thousand lamps once lit in its assembly hall and remains an important Shia centre.

Colonial Madras: Fort St George

The English East India Company completed Fort St George in 1644 — the first English fortress in India, and the seed from which the modern city grew. Today its ramparts enclose the Tamil Nadu state secretariat and legislative assembly, so the fort remains a working seat of government. Within the walls stands St Mary’s Church, consecrated in 1680 and reckoned the oldest Anglican church in India, sometimes dubbed the Westminster Abbey of the East for its weathered memorials to the Company’s dead. The Fort Museum, housed in the former Exchange building, gathers weapons, coins, portraits and relics of the Madras Presidency across its galleries.

Museums, monuments and gardens

Chennai’s grandest museum is the Government Museum at Egmore, founded in 1851 and second in age only to Kolkata’s. Set in a cluster of Indo-Saracenic buildings that also hold the Connemara Public Library, it is famous above all for its bronze gallery, home to one of the finest collections of Chola bronzes anywhere — serene Natarajas and processional deities cast a thousand years ago. For a very different monument, Valluvar Kottam near Nungambakkam is a 39 m temple-chariot in granite, built in 1976 to honour the classical Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar, with all 1,330 couplets of his Thirukkural inscribed around the courtyard.

Greenery is closer than the traffic suggests. Semmozhi Poonga, a botanical garden on Cathedral Road opened in 2010, offers a landscaped retreat in the centre of town, while Guindy National Park — one of the smallest national parks in India, at about 2.7 sq km — survives as scrub forest inside the city, sheltering blackbuck and spotted deer beside the adjoining Snake Park and Children’s Park. Families with more time head south to the Arignar Anna Zoological Park at Vandalur, one of India’s largest zoos. Back on the Marina, Vivekananda House — the 1842 Ice House where Swami Vivekananda stayed in 1897 — now holds a museum to his life.

When to visit and getting around

The most comfortable months are November to February, after the north-east monsoon and before the fierce coastal summer; December also brings the Margazhi music season, when Carnatic concerts fill the city’s sabhas. Getting around is easiest on the Chennai Metro, whose lines connect the airport, Egmore and the central districts, supplemented by the older suburban railway that threads the coast and the suburbs. Auto-rickshaws and app cabs cover the shorter hops to temple lanes and beachfronts.

With a few days more, Chennai makes a fine base for exploring the wider region: see our guide to day trips at /india/tamil-nadu/guides/day-trips-from-chennai and the story of the Pallava shore temples at /india/tamil-nadu/guides/mahabalipuram-pallava-monuments-story.