Yercaud’s little-known tourist attraction — the abandoned houses of Pagoda Point

Yercaud is a sleepy little hill station. It has a little lake, with little restaurants lined all around. Little carts selling pakodas dot its little lanes and bylanes.

But not everything about Yercaud is little. In Montfort, it has one of the biggest schools in South India. There’s also the Kiliyur waterfall, a spectacular 300-foot drop (when there is water).

Yercaud also boasts of view several points that offer views as expansive as you’ve ever seen: there’s Gent’s Seat, Lady’s Seat and Children’s Seat, from where you can get a bird’s eye view of Salem — and there’s a nice view of the Yercaud Lake from Arthur’s Seat.

The most intriguing of all of Yercaud’s attractions is Pagoda Point.

The place itself does absolutely no justice to its name: there are four piles of stones that look like tiny pyramids about head high, built by locals many, many years ago. And that’s about it.

However, what does catch the eye, and the imagination, is a colony of houses — well-designed, modern homes that no one lives in. Completely abandoned.

Row after row, street after street, these identical villas are a picture of dereliction. The roads are overgrown with weeds; nature is slowly reclaiming the houses.

What is surprising is how well-made these houses are. The layout is nice — most are duplexes with two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor and another room and a large sit-out on the first floor.

There were plans for glass-enclosed staircases. All in all, the design allowed for ample natural light.

But somewhere, it all went wrong.

This colony of 67 houses was once part of the Tamil Nadu government’s ‘Small and Medium Towns’ program.

However, in the excitement of setting up, a whole host of engineers, planners, surveyors, and government officials forgot one crucial criteria for a housing project — water.

High up on a hill, it became terribly difficult to source water; the borewells couldn’t drill deep enough for a steady supply. The project was doomed.

Locals say the buildings are on the market today for Rs 10 lakh. But, unsurprisingly, there aren’t any takers.

And so, in a strange twist of fate, Pagoda Point, the one ‘attraction’ in Yercaud which didn’t have much to offer, now has tourists driving up the hill in droves to go exploring in its colony of abandoned houses.