Madurai is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world — over 2,500 years old and still pulsing with the same intensity. The city is built around the Meenakshi Amman Temple, one of the great Hindu temples of south India, and daily life here revolves around it. Step through one of the nine towering gopurams — the gateway towers encrusted with thousands of painted stucco figures — and you enter a complex that functions as temple, meeting place, market and pilgrimage destination all at once.
Outside the temple compound, Madurai is loud, crowded and thoroughly rewarding. The streets around the temple are packed with flower sellers, tailors and banana-leaf restaurants. The evening flower market is unforgettable — mountains of jasmine sold by weight for women's hair. The Thirumalai Nayak Palace, a 17th-century Indo-Saracenic monument, is a short walk south. The Gandhi Memorial Museum, in the old palace of the Rani Mangammal, has an unexpectedly moving collection that includes the blood-stained garment Gandhi wore when he was assassinated.
Tiruparankundram, one of the six abodes of Lord Murugan, is a rock-cut temple about 8 km south of the city and well worth a half-day trip.
Plan two or three days in town: see the main temple in the early morning and again at night, when the priests close the inner shrines with ceremonies that have not changed in centuries. Eat at Murugan Idli Shop, drink at Famous Jigarthanda, and stay up late for kothu parotta on the streets around Simmakkal.