Haridwar
One Of The Seven Holy Cities (Sapta Puri) And One Of The Four Kumbh Mela Cities · Haridwar, Uttarakhand
One of the seven holiest cities of Hinduism, where the Ganges leaves the Himalayan foothills and enters the plains, and one of the four cities that host the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious gathering on earth, every twelve years. Its heart is Har ki Pauri, a ghat said to bear the footprint of Vishnu, where every evening at dusk the Ganga aarti is performed before a crowd of thousands, with great brass lamps swung over the water and floating leaf-boats of flowers and candles sent down the fast current. It is bigger, louder and more intense than Rishikesh's aarti, half an hour up the road. Ropeways climb to the hilltop temples of Mansa Devi and Chandi Devi. Every July, in the Kanwar Yatra, millions of Shiva devotees come to collect Ganges water here and carry it home on foot, and the whole region's roads are given over to them. Haridwar is a busy, crowded pilgrim town rather than a place of calm, vegetarian and alcohol-free by rule. Pilgrims come to bathe, to perform rites for the dead and to consult the priests who keep family genealogy records going back generations.
Har ki Pauri, Haridwar, Uttarakhand, 249401, India
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED; confirm before travelling. The usual pattern: the ghats are open at all hours; the evening aarti at Har ki Pauri begins around sunset, roughly 5:30 pm in winter to about 7 pm in summer, and the dawn aarti before sunrise. The ropeways run in the day, roughly from early morning to early evening, and can pause in storms. The Kanwar Yatra in Shravan (roughly July to August) and Kumbh years close roads and ghats, and arriving at Har ki Pauri just before dusk means seeing nothing.