Batu Caves

The limestone of Batu Caves is over 400 million years old, a mogote, a steep-sided tower of rock, standing about 325 metres in Gombak, Selangor. There are some twenty recognised caves in it, four of them large systems of connected chambers, worked by water into stalactites, stalagmites and flowstone.

The Temuan people used the caves long before any of the later history. In the 1860s Chinese settlers worked them for guano, and the American naturalist William Hornaday documented the site scientifically in 1878.

The Tamil trader K. Thamboosamy Pillai championed the caves as a place of Hindu worship, reportedly because the mouth of the main cave resembles a vel, the spear Murugan carries. The temple dedicated to Murugan was completed in 1891, and Thaipusam has been observed here since 1892.

Access was on foot at first. Wooden stairs went up in 1920 and had decayed by the 1930s; the 272 concrete steps that everyone climbs today were built in 1940, on a proposal by Ramachandra Naidu, and were repainted in colour in 2018.

The gold Murugan statue at the foot of the stairway, 42.7 metres tall, was unveiled in January 2006. It is among the tallest Murugan statues in the world and the tallest statue of any kind in Malaysia.

Thaipusam is why most people in the wider Murugan world know this hill. Devotees carry kavadi up the steps, many having kept a vow of abstinence beforehand, and the observance includes the piercing traditions that have made the images from this site internationally recognisable.

The ordinary daily schedule is replaced entirely on Thaipusam, Shivaratri and Navaratri, and the site runs through the night. Two schedules operate even on ordinary days, one for the temples at the foot of the hill, another for the Murugan shrine in the cave at the top.

The Murugan shrine occupies the Temple Cave, also called the Cathedral Cave, at the top of the stairway. It is not the only chamber in the hill. The Ramayana Cave tells the story of Rama through painted statues and murals along its length, and the Cave Villa holds further displays.

The Dark Cave is a different matter. About two kilometres of its passages have been surveyed, and it shelters Liphistius batuensis, the Batu Caves trapdoor spider, a species found only here and at one cave in nearby Templer Park, described as a living fossil and assessed as endangered, with fewer than 250 mature individuals estimated. The Dark Cave is closed to visitors, and the Malaysian Nature Society has confirmed there are no plans to reopen it.

It is worth knowing that the hill a pilgrim climbs is also one of the more fragile pieces of habitat in the region.

The stairway is steep and exposed, and the published times are for the shrine, not for the queue on the stairs. Malaysia runs two and a half hours ahead of India, which matters if you are coordinating with anyone at home.

Unlike the temples of the six abodes, this one is not covered by a government religious endowments register, so its times are the temple's own published schedule. We have marked them accordingly.