Ubud: the Capital of Craft, Art and Yoga in Bali

Ubud is a town in Gianyar regency in central Bali, a few dozen kilometres north of Denpasar, regarded as the cultural heart of the island. Since the 1930s it has been a centre of painting and carving, surrounded by a ring of craft villages, and since the early 2000s also one of the most important places in the world for yoga and wellness.

In this article we describe how the royal family of Ubud and European painters turned a village into a capital of art, which museums are worth a visit, what the villages around the town do, where yoga came from, what the market and the monkey forest are like, how to visit temples with respect, when to go, and why most of the things we bring home are made in the countryside around Ubud.

How did Ubud become a capital of art?

Ubud has been ruled for generations by the Sukawati family, descendants of the princes of nearby Sukawati, whose seat is the palace of Puri Saren Agung in the centre of town, opposite the market. Dance performances are held in the palace courtyard in the evenings, and the princely family still lives in part of the compound. The turning point came in the 1930s, when Prince Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati invited European artists to Ubud. The German painter and musician Walter Spies settled here in the late 1920s, and the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet soon joined him. Both not only painted Bali but taught local artists new techniques: perspective, anatomy, easel painting, which merged with the Balinese wayang tradition described in our piece on Kamasan painting.

In 1936 Spies, Bonnet and Prince Sukawati founded the Pita Maha association, which brought together several dozen Balinese painters and carvers, guarded the quality of their work and organised exhibitions, including abroad. This is when the “Ubud style” took shape: dense, detailed scenes of village life, fields and ceremonies, painted with many planes and soft light. The war and Spies's death in 1942 interrupted the association, but its spirit survived in the museums founded after the war and in the workshops where teaching still passes from father to son.

Which museums in Ubud are worth seeing?

• Museum Puri Lukisan — the oldest art museum in Bali, founded by Bonnet and the Sukawati family in the 1950s; in pavilions among lotus ponds hang Pita Maha paintings and carvings from the first half of the twentieth century,
• Neka Art Museum — founded in the 1980s by the collector Suteja Neka in Sanggingan; a cross-section from classical painting through Pita Maha to foreign artists connected with Bali, plus a large separate collection of kris daggers,
• ARMA (Agung Rai Museum of Art) — in Pengosekan, opened in the 1990s by Agung Rai; a collection of Balinese and Javanese painting including works by Walter Spies, set in a garden with dance and painting classes for local children.

All three can be seen in one unhurried day, and it is best to start with Puri Lukisan, because it shows where the rest came from.

The craft villages around Ubud

Ubud is a town, but craft lives in the villages along the road from Denpasar. Each has specialised in one material for generations, and the workshops stand side by side along the main street, with the studio at the back and a shop at the front. A wider map of the island is in our piece on the craft villages of Bali.

We write more about the carvers of Mas in our piece on the masters of wood carving, and about silver in Silver from Celuk through six hands. The terraces at Tegallalang are part of the irrigation system described in our article on subak and the UNESCO rice terraces.

Where did yoga in Ubud come from?

Ubud has drawn people in search of calm since the days of Spies, but yoga as a mass phenomenon arrived in the early 2000s. The first large centres appeared, among them the Yoga Barn, and the Bali Spirit festival, followed by hundreds of smaller studios, retreats, teacher trainings and plant-based cafés. A huge influence was Elizabeth Gilbert's book “Eat, Pray, Love” from 2006 and its film adaptation from 2010, whose Balinese chapters are set in Ubud; after the film's release the number of visitors rose sharply, and with it prices, traffic and building around the town. Today Ubud is a place where at dawn a yoga class is easier to find than a parking space; what that practice is laid on is the subject of our piece on cork, rubber and jute mats.

The market, the palace and the monkey forest

Pasar Ubud, the market opposite the palace, begins its day before dawn as a food market for residents: vegetables, fruit, flowers for canang sari (the daily offerings of palm leaves). Around midday it turns into a souvenir market: sarongs, baskets, carvings, paintings. Bargaining is the norm and opening prices can be several times too high; after rebuilding, the market occupies a new multi-storey building, but the rhythm of the day is the same.

At the southern end of the main street lies Mandala Suci Wenara Wana, known as the Monkey Forest: a dozen or so hectares of temple forest belonging to the village of Padangtegal, with three temples, including the temple of the dead Pura Dalem Agung Padangtegal, and over a thousand long-tailed macaques. The forest is a sacred place, not a zoo: the monkeys are wild, they snatch glasses and bottles, and feeding them outside the designated points is forbidden. Entry is paid at the village ticket office, and the income goes to maintaining the forest and temples.

How to visit Ubud with respect, and when to go

• In temples — a sarong and sash (available to borrow at the entrance), covered shoulders, do not climb onto platforms or walls, do not stand higher than the priest; people with open wounds and women during menstruation traditionally do not enter the temple grounds,
• In the street — do not step on the canang sari lying on the pavement; if it happens by accident, simply walk on,
• At a ceremony — ask before taking a photo, do not use flash, do not walk in front of people praying,
• In a workshop — bargain calmly and with a smile, but do not halve the price of a carver who spent a week on a figure,
• Season — the dry season runs roughly from April to October; July and August are peak season; from November to March it rains in the afternoons, but it is green and quiet. During Nyepi (the Balinese new year of the saka calendar, usually in March) the island stops for a day: no traffic, no lights, no flights.

What this means for the objects in your home

Every object has a face, and the faces of most of the things we bring home are from around Ubud. In August 2026 we drove the same road as the tourists: from Batubulan, where at Yuliani Stone Carving stone turns into guardians, through Celuk and its silver, to Mas, where I Wayan Latra of Karya Mas and the gallery of Ketut Puja carve suar wood, and on to the terraces of Tegallalang. That is where the carvings and figures in our shop come from, and part of the handcraft. For us Ubud is less a destination than a return address.