The temple is one of many reasons
to come to Thanjavur.
Eight articles on the city around the temple — the Maratha palace, the Saraswathi Mahal library, the Thanjavur painting tradition, the food, and where to spend two or three days.
Thanjavur City — overview
Thanjavur, an old administrative town on the Kaveri delta, has the unusual luxury of three first-rate sights inside a thirty-minute walk: a UNESCO-listed thousand-year-old temple, a fortified Nayak-Maratha palace, and one of the oldest libraries in Asia, full of palm-leaf manuscripts. None of them is the others' rival; the visitor who comes for the temple and skips the palace and the library has missed two-thirds of the city.
This pillar is for that visitor. The hotel page is the most consulted — Thanjavur is not, as cities go, well-supplied with rooms, and the two heritage properties are booked far in advance. The food page is honest about which restaurants are worth the visit and which are not. The itinerary pages are the two we hand to most international visitors.