Ellora Caves

Ellora's 34 monasteries and temples were excavated from the basalt cliffs of Charanandri Hills between roughly 600 and 1000 CE. The site is unique for its inter-faith range — 12 Buddhist caves (caves 1–12), 17 Hindu (caves 13–29), and 5 Jain (caves 30–34) — all carved in the same cliff face during overlapping centuries, evidence of the religious pluralism of the Rashtrakuta-era Deccan. The single-most extraordinary structure is the Kailasa Temple (Cave 16) — a full-size Hindu temple to Shiva carved top-down from a single cliff in the 8th century by King Krishna I of the Rashtrakuta dynasty. Workers removed an estimated 200,000 tonnes of rock to leave the temple standing free with three storeys, courtyards, an entrance gateway, and finely-carved external panels of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. UNESCO-inscribed 1983; pair with Ajanta (100 km north-east) on a 2-day Aurangabad heritage trip.