Tirta Empul Temple
— — the water that has been holy for a thousand years.
Not only on a wall.
“A Hindu water temple built around a cold spring that has not stopped running since the tenth century. The bathing court holds two long pools and a row of carved spouts, and people step under each one in order, hands cupped, eyes closed. The compound sits in the Pakerisan valley, an hour north of Ubud, with rice terraces falling away on three sides. Mornings here are quiet, before the coaches come up from the south. — from the studio
Tirta Empul Temple, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Pura Tirta Empul sits in the village of Manukaya, in the Tampaksiring district of Gianyar Regency, central Bali, about thirty-nine kilometres north-east of Denpasar. The temple was founded around 962 CE during the Warmadewa dynasty and is built over a natural spring that feeds the Pakerisan River, a UNESCO-listed cultural landscape. The complex is divided into three courtyards in the standard Balinese tri mandala layout, with the central jaba tengah holding the rectangular purification pools. The presidential palace built by Sukarno in 1954 stands on the hillside immediately above the temple grounds.
The spring rises in the inner courtyard and runs clear and cold year-round, feeding thirty carved stone spouts arranged along two bathing pools. The ritual called melukat moves the worshipper from spout to spout in order, with two specific outlets reserved for funerary use and skipped by the living. The same water continues downhill into the Pakerisan and is diverted through the centuries-old subak irrigation network that waters the rice terraces of Tegallalang and Gunung Kawi. The river was carved with eleventh-century shrines a short walk downstream.
The temple is open daily from roughly 08:00 to 18:00, with an entry donation and a required sarong, which the temple lends at the gate. Visitors who wish to enter the pools rent a separate green sarong and are asked to follow the order of the spouts and to refrain from photographs inside the water. Saturdays and Balinese ceremonial days draw the largest crowds, with quieter conditions an hour before closing. The temple is about forty minutes by car from Ubud and often paired with Gunung Kawi, two kilometres south.