India · State of Andhra Pradesh
Where to Stay in Srikakulam, State of Andhra Pradesh
Srikakulam, Chicacole in colonial times, heads Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh and the ring of Buddhist sites around it.
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Where to stay in Srikakulam
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Srikakulam is a base before it is a destination. The Buddhist sites that bring most visitors, Salihundam above all, lie out in Srikakulam district rather than inside the city, so the choice of a room is really a choice about how far each morning's drive should be. The centre keeps that drive short.
A central room puts the district offices and the roads out toward Kalinga Patnam within the same few minutes. That suits anyone whose days will be spent moving between the district's sites. Staying nearer the sites is the other option.
Salihundam, Singupuram, Jagati Metta, Nagari Peta and Dabbaka Vaani Peta are spread through Srikakulam district, and a bed closer to that scatter cuts the daily distance at the cost of everything a district headquarters provides. Rooms are few in Srikakulam either way. Chicacole is what colonial records called this city, and a visitor who finds it on a map from that period is looking at the same streets, the same district, and the same roads toward the stupas.
The stupas at Salihundam are the reason most of this traffic comes at all.
About Srikakulam
Buddhism left the deepest marks here.
What is Srikakulam known for?
Srikakulam district carries a scatter of Buddhist sites, among them Salihundam, Kalinga Patnam and Singupuram, that make the city the natural base for anyone following them. Chicacole was the colonial name. The city itself serves as the district headquarters, and the offices that go with the role sit alongside a tourism built almost entirely on what stands outside the municipal boundary.
What are the main landmarks in Srikakulam?
Salihundam holds the district's best-known stupas. Rock-cut stupas stand inside chaitya grihas there, brick stupas carry a wheel pattern in their plan, and votive stupas crowd the ground around them, with inscriptions cut into the steps that climb to them. A star sits atop one stupa.
The site museum keeps more than two dozen sculpted figures, among them images of Buddha and of Jain Teerthankars, and the same district holds Kalinga Patnam, Singupuram, Jagati Metta, Nagari Peta and Dabbaka Vaani Peta.
What is the history of Srikakulam?
Buddhism is the oldest layer in this district. Salihundam's stupas, cut from rock and raised in brick, record a period when the country around Srikakulam was ground worth building on, and the inscriptions on their steps survive as the plainest evidence of it. Sites multiplied across the district.
Kalinga Patnam, Singupuram, Jagati Metta, Nagari Peta and Dabbaka Vaani Peta each carry their own share of that Buddhist inheritance, which is why the district is described by its sites rather than by any single one of them. Chicacole is the name the colonial period used. Under it the city appears in the records of that era, and the return of the older name left the place unchanged while changing every map and letterhead that referred to it.
Both names still surface, since a place written down as Chicacole and as Srikakulam accumulates two sets of references that never fully merge. Administration settled here. Srikakulam serves as the headquarters of Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh, which gives a city of about twenty square kilometres a reach across a much larger stretch of country in India.
Where is Srikakulam?
Srikakulam is small for a district capital, about twenty square kilometres of built ground. The district it administers runs far past that edge, and the Buddhist sites it is known for, Salihundam and Kalinga Patnam among them, lie scattered well beyond the city's own limits. The tropics govern the ground.
What grows here answers to that.
What is the climate of Srikakulam?
Warm months follow warm months here. Srikakulam sits north of the equator inside the tropical band, so the year turns on heat and its absence rather than on any hard freeze, and the stupa sites out in the district stay open ground in every season. Frost plays no part.
The northern hemisphere's deep winter never really arrives.
How do you get to Srikakulam?
Srikakulam is where the district's roads meet. As the headquarters of Srikakulam district, the city takes the traffic of the country around it, and the roads that carry it are the same ones a visitor follows out to Salihundam. Andhra Pradesh supplies the longer approaches, and India the visitors who have come for the Buddhist sites rather than for the district.
Chicacole marks the same place on older maps. Kalinga Patnam, Singupuram and the rest sit far enough out that a vehicle, rather than a walk, is what connects them to a bed in the city.
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Updated August 2026