A limestone massif on the edge of Kuala Lumpur containing a series of caves and cave temples, the largest of which is a cathedral-scale chamber open to the sky, with a 400-year-old Hindu shrine at its base.
The limestone of Batu Caves is 400 million years old — it was being formed on the floor of a shallow Devonian sea before the first land plants had evolved, before insects existed, before vertebrates had made it to land. The caves inside were carved by water over the last two million years, as tropical rainfall moved through the rock''s cracks and slowly dissolved the limestone along its fault lines.
The result is a system of chambers, the largest of which — Cathedral Cave — is 100 metres tall, open to the sky through a collapsed roof, and accessible via 272 concrete steps painted in bright colours. At the top of the stairs, past the 43-metre gold statue of the Hindu deity Murugan that stands at the base, the cave opens into a volume that stops conversation.
The scale is not what the brain expects from a cave. It expects small, enclosed, dark. What it gets is a space larger than most cathedrals, lit by indirect daylight that enters through the collapsed ceiling, the walls covered in stalactites and the nests of swiftlets, the air cool and echoing and smelling of earth and limestone and incense from the temple shrines that have occupied the interior since 1891.
During the Hindu festival of Thaipusam, which occurs in January or February, up to 1.5 million pilgrims climb the steps to the cave in a single day. They carry kavadi — elaborate structures supported by needles pushed through their skin — as acts of devotion. The cave holds them all and is unchanged.