Girnar Lili Parikrama

The route

What defines it

1. 01

   36 km through the Girnar forest, Bhavnath to Bhavnath

2. 02

   Kartik Shukla Ekadashi to Purnima

3. 03

   Ashoka, Rudradaman and Skandagupta on one rock at the foot

4. 04

   Peaks of Ambaji, Gorakhnath and Guru Dattatreya; Jain Neminath temples

5. 05

   About ten lakh in 2024; cancelled for rain in 2025

01Raivataka and Urjayat

Girnar is the old Raivataka of the Mahabharata, near Dwarka, where the Yadavas held their hill festivals. At its foot, on the road out of Junagadh, a single granite boulder carries three inscriptions: the fourteen rock edicts of Ashoka in the third century BCE; the Sanskrit record of the Shaka ruler Rudradaman from about 150 CE, which calls the hill Urjayat and tells how he rebuilt the Sudarshana lake after a storm burst its dam; and the record of the Gupta emperor Skandagupta from the 450s describing another repair. The summits carry Ambaji, Gorakhnath, and the peak of Guru Dattatreya, whose footprints are worshipped there; on the way up stand the Jain temples of Neminath, the twenty-second Tirthankara, who attained nirvana on Girnar.

02The green parikrama

Lili means green, for the forest the path runs through. The walk begins at Bhavnath at the foot of the hill on Kartik Shukla Ekadashi, the day Bhagwan Vishnu wakes, and ends on Kartik Purnima. The 36 km circuit is done in three or four days, with night halts at clearings such as Zinabava ni Madhi, Malvela and Bordevi, where sevak groups cook for everyone free. The forest is part of the Girnar wildlife sanctuary, home to Asiatic lions, so the forest department opens the route only for these days and bans plastic. Separately, pilgrims climb the hill by its stone stairway of some ten thousand steps; since October 2020 a ropeway also runs to Ambaji.

03Lakhs, and a washed-out year

The parikrama has grown from a sadhus’ circuit into one of Gujarat’s largest gatherings. In 2024, when it began on 12 November, reports put the walkers at around ten lakh, and the Gujarat road transport corporation ran extra buses from Ahmedabad. In 2025 it was to run from 2 to 5 November, but unseasonal rain at the end of October washed away much of the earthen path inside the sanctuary. The Junagadh administration cancelled it for the public, and on 2 November a small group of saints walked a symbolic parikrama so that the custom would not be broken, while pilgrims who had already come were allowed darshan at Bhavnath and on the hill.

In the texts

• Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman

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