Top 10 Places to Visit in Varanasi

The city's layout follows the river rather than a planned grid: a crescent of some 84 stone ghats curves along the western bank for about 6.8 kilometres, from Assi Ghat in the south to Adi Keshav Ghat in the north, while the old city behind them is a dense knot of lanes too narrow for cars, navigable mainly on foot, by cycle-rickshaw, or by the two-wheelers that squeeze through regardless. Kashi Vishwanath Temple, one of Hinduism's twelve Jyotirlingas, sits at the heart of this old quarter, now connected to the river by the redeveloped Kashi Vishwanath Corridor completed in 2021.

Transport hubs sit at the city's edges rather than its centre: Lal Bahadur Shastri International Airport at Babatpur lies roughly 25 kilometres northwest, while Varanasi Junction (also called Varanasi Cantt) and the newer Banaras station handle the bulk of rail arrivals a few kilometres from the ghats. Sarnath, the Buddhist site where the Buddha delivered his first sermon, sits about 10 kilometres north and is close enough to visit within a single morning. Banaras Hindu University anchors the city's southern end, giving the Assi Ghat area a distinctly academic, longer-stay character compared to the pilgrim-dense lanes around Dashashwamedh Ghat and Kashi Vishwanath Temple further north.

October through March brings the most comfortable temperatures for walking the ghats and old-city lanes, avoiding both the pre-monsoon heat that pushes past 40°C in May and June and the monsoon flooding (July–September) that can submerge lower ghat steps entirely. Early winter mornings bring dense river fog that softens sunrise boat rides into something closer to abstraction than clear photography, a trade-off photographers should plan around rather than fight.