Lepakshi

Lepakshi sits on a low granite outcrop called Kurma Saila, the tortoise hill, about 120 kilometres north of Bengaluru and 15 kilometres from Hindupur. The Veerabhadra Temple was built in the 1530s under Achyuta Deva Raya by two brothers, Virupanna and Viranna, governors for the Vijayanagara empire; legend says Virupanna was blinded for spending treasury money on it, which is offered as the reason the kalyana mandapa was left unfinished, its columns standing open to the sky with half-carved gods still emerging from the stone. Inside, the ceiling of the mukha mandapa carries a fresco of Veerabhadra roughly seven metres by four, the largest painting on a single panel in India, worked in vegetable pigment on lime plaster, with other panels showing the fourteen incarnations of Shiva and a procession of donors in Vijayanagara dress.

One column of the natya mandapa, the famous hanging pillar, is slightly off its base, and guides slide a sheet of cloth underneath it. A large footprint pressed into the rock is called Sita's. A kilometre from the temple a Nandi cut from a single granite boulder lies about 8.2 metres long and 4.5 metres high, the largest monolithic Nandi in India, facing the temple's coiled naga linga.

It is a half-day stop, easily paired with Bengaluru or Puttaparthi.