Ubud

Ubud's name comes from ubad, the Balinese word for medicine, after the healing plants that grew along the Campuhan river where two streams meet. Tradition holds that the Javanese priest Rsi Markandeya meditated there in about the eighth century and founded the shrine at Pura Gunung Lebah. The surrounding district was settled around temples and irrigation societies, and royal houses descended from the princes of Sukawati established themselves at Ubud, building the palace that still stands in the centre in the early 19th century.

Ubud's ruling family came to terms with the Dutch, and the town was spared the violent conquest that fell on Badung and Klungkung a few years later. The princes continued as patrons of temple arts. The change that made the modern town came in the 1930s, when the German painter and musician Walter Spies and the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet settled nearby under the patronage of Cokorda Gde Agung Sukawati. Working with Balinese artists, they helped found the Pita Maha association, which encouraged painting for sale rather than only for temples and shifted subjects towards everyday village life.

Museum Puri Lukisan was founded in the town to hold this work. Visitors arrived slowly through the following decades, drawn by dance, painting and the landscape rather than by beaches, and Penestanan gained its own school of young painters in the 1960s. From the 1990s tourism accelerated sharply, and a bestselling memoir published in 2006, later filmed, brought a wave of wellness and yoga travel. The town has grown outward into the surrounding villages ever since, with traffic and land prices the constant subject of local debate.

Ubud has been Bali's cultural centre for a century, and its reputation rests on performance and craft rather than on any single monument. Gamelan gong kebyar groups rehearse in village halls, and legong, barong and kecak are staged most evenings in palace and temple courtyards. Peliatan's dancers and gamelan groups have long toured internationally. Because the performances are drawn from temple repertoire, the same dancers and musicians play at ceremonies that have nothing to do with visitors.

Craft villages ring the town, each with a speciality inherited over generations: wood carving at Mas and Nyuh Kuning, stone carving at Batubulan, silver at Celuk, painting at Batuan and Penestanan. The painting styles that developed here — the crowded Batuan manner, the Young Artists' bright village scenes, the Pita Maha work of the 1930s — fill the museums at Sanggingan and in the centre.

Daily religious life continues regardless. Canang sari offerings appear on doorsteps and scooter seats at dawn, the banjar organises ceremonies and cremations, and a royal cremation draws thousands to watch a tall tower carried through the streets. Temple anniversaries, odalan, follow the 210-day calendar rather than the Gregorian one, so ceremonies can fall on any day. Visitors are welcome at most of them if dressed correctly, standing back and not crossing in front of people at prayer. Foreign residents are numerous, and local patience with immodest dress or behaviour at sacred sites has worn thin, a subject the provincial authorities have addressed with published rules for visitors.

Ubud is a district as much as a town: the central village has about 12,000 people, and the wider administrative district of Ubud, taking in the surrounding villages, had about 75,000 at the 2020 census. Almost everyone is Balinese Hindu, organised through banjar neighbourhood councils that run ceremonies, disputes and community work, and through the subak societies that still divide the irrigation water among the rice fields.

Tourism dominates the economy — hotels, villas, restaurants, spas, yoga schools, galleries and driving — alongside the craft workshops that supply them and rice farming that continues on the terraces between. Many households combine several of these. The Covid-19 border closures emptied the town for two years and pushed people back to farming and fishing, and the recovery since has brought record numbers, along with new villas on former rice land, traffic that can take half an hour to cross the centre, and arguments about water use, waste and foreigners working without permits.

The day begins before six with offerings, market shopping and the cooler hours for work, slows through the heat of midday, and picks up again in the late afternoon when temple bells and gamelan practice start. Evenings are early by Balinese standards; the town is not a nightlife destination. Schools, health posts and temples anchor the villages, and the ceremonial calendar regularly takes precedence over business hours.

Balinese cooking is built on base genep, a paste of shallots, garlic, galangal, turmeric, ginger, chilli, candlenut and shrimp paste, and Ubud is a good place to eat it because the surrounding villages supply the produce. Babi guling, suckling pig turned on a spit over coconut husks, is the celebrated dish, usually eaten at midday and sold out by early afternoon. Bebek and ayam betutu, duck or chicken stuffed with spices and cooked slowly wrapped in leaves, is the other ceremonial speciality.

Everyday eating means nasi campur: rice with a spoonful each of lawar, a mix of vegetables, grated coconut and minced meat, sate lilit of minced fish or pork pressed onto lemongrass sticks, tempeh in sweet soy, urap vegetables and a fierce sambal matah of raw shallot, lemongrass and chilli. Warungs serve it from glass cabinets, and prices are a fraction of those on the main street.

Ubud is also the centre of Bali's meat-free cooking, with long-established vegetarian, vegan and raw-food restaurants, juice bars and health cafés clustered along Jalan Hanoman and Monkey Forest Road — a scene that grew from the yoga community and now sits alongside the warungs. Coffee from the Kintamani highlands is roasted and sold locally, and the plantations north of town offer tastings that include kopi luwak. Sweet snacks are sold at the morning market: jaje Bali rice cakes, pisang goreng, and bubur injin, black sticky rice with grated coconut and palm sugar.