Ramanathaswamy Temple

The Ramanathaswamy Temple occupies the island of Rameswaram at the tip of Tamil Nadu, where the Ramayana says Rama set up and worshipped a Shiva lingam before building his bridge to Lanka, asking the god to remain there as the lord of Rama, Rameshvara.

The shrine is therefore one of the twelve Jyotirlingas of Shiva, a Char Dham pilgrimage destination. The Pandya kings enlarged it in the 1100s and the Sri Lankan ruler Parakrama Bahu aided its sanctum, but in 1311 Malik Kafur's Delhi army sacked the island and destroyed its temples.

The Jaffna kings Jeyaveera and Gunaveera Cinkaiariyan rebuilt the sanctum between 1380 and the early 1400s, ferrying stone from Trincomalee, and the present structure took shape in the 1600s under the Ramnad Sethupathi rajas, whose builders gave it the longest pillared corridor of any Hindu temple in India.