Batu Bolong: fields, a temple and the path to the beach
Compiled by Surf Haunts · Updated 2026-10-20
Batu Bolong is a beach on the Canggu coast of Bali, in the North Kuta district of Badung. You reach it along a paved approach past dense vegetation, with Pura Batu Bolong – the temple – standing above the water at the end.
A temple on the coastal register
Badung's planning records settle the geography. The North Kuta spatial plan places Pura Batu Bolong within Canggu Village and lists it as a protected cultural building, and the regency's tourism office connects the temple, the village and the Canggu beachfront in its coastal-management work. We stop there. The temple is a working place of worship, and this story does not interpret its ceremonies or its meaning; it identifies what stands at the end of the path.
From paddy fields to hotels
What has changed is everything around the path. Canggu was a village of rice fields and coconut groves on Bali's west coast. The Tugu Hotel, built in the mid-1990s, was designed around a 100-metre coastal setback law; by the time Al Jazeera reported from Canggu in December 2019, a new hotel was opening with six parking spaces, sharecroppers were paying a quarter of their crop in rent, and a village chief summed it up in four words: "our infrastructure can't cope".
The village has said so itself. In July 2023 the Bandung Institute of Technology held a meeting in Canggu's customary village hall with the village authorities and Badung's regency government. The subak irrigation official agreed that the number of fields in Canggu is decreasing, and the village elder asked for rules near the temples – a two-storey limit, among them. The tourism office's answer was agro-tourism as a way to keep farmland farmed.
Why the print keeps the path
The point of painting the approach rather than the beach is that the approach is what Canggu is losing. An ochre path, bright foliage, two compact rooflines, dark rock and turquoise water: that sequence still exists, and the print holds it without claiming the architecture is exact or that the sea looks like this every day.
Do you know Canggu?
If your family farmed here, or you photographed the coast before the building started, email us. We'll ask before publishing anything and agree how to credit you.
Our Batu Bolong print
Our Batu Bolong print follows the ochre path beside yellow-green foliage toward two small rooflines, with dark rock and turquoise water opening to the left and broad cream clouds above.
Compiled from public historical sources and fact-checked against them at the time of writing – not a first-hand or local account. Corrections and memories are welcome; we verify before publishing anything sent in.