Badas district is a lowland kecamatan of eight villages in Kediri Regency, East Java, set just north of the town of Pare on the flat rice plain that runs between the Brantas River and the foothills of Mount Kelud. It is a small district, about 43 square kilometres, and nothing in it rises above the level of the paddies. What it does have is unusually dense for its size: a fourteenth-century Majapahit temple, a village known locally for beekeeping, a cave and a dam, a market that carries the memory of a Dutch-era sugar company, and a settlement pattern of long-named hamlets strung along farm roads.
The short answer to why look at Badas is the temple of Surowono in the village of Canggu. Everything else here is worth a stop if you are already travelling the Pare and Kediri countryside, and the sections below set out how the district is arranged, what each village holds and how it connects to its neighbours.
Where Badas District Sits in Kediri Regency
Badas lies on the eastern, lowland side of the Brantas in the northern half of Kediri Regency. Pare is its southern neighbour. To the west lie the districts of Plemahan and Kunjang, to the east Kandangan, and along the north the district touches the boundary with Jombang Regency, where the neighbouring district is Ngoro. Kunjang, a district with its own write-up here, is where the regency edge meets the Konto River and the weir at Rolak 70.
The district was carved out of Pare district in 2004, in the same round of splits that also produced Ngasem and Kayen Kidul, which is why its administrative identity is younger than the villages themselves. The postal code for the district is 64196.
Almost the whole surface of Badas is farmed. This is the same wet-rice lowland that the regency’s own description gives to the eastern side of the Brantas, running out toward Kras in the south of the regency. A reader coming from the city should think of flat fields, irrigation channels, ricefield-edge hamlets and farm lanes, not hills.
The Eight Villages of Badas
Badas has eight desa and no urban kelurahan. Each village is a cluster of named hamlets, and the hamlet names are the most useful local map:
- Badas, the village that gives the district its name, with the hamlets Badas, Balongrejo, Bulurejo, Jarakan, Matakan, Nganten, Pohblembem, Sumberjo, Sumbersari and Tegalrejo.
- Blaru, with Balongcino, Balongjambe, Bancangan, Batan, Karangdowo, Klampokrejo, Ngampelrejo, Selorejo and Slangkingrejo — nine hamlets, tied with Krecek for the most of any village here.
- Bringin, with Bringin, Bunut, Ketangi and Purworejo.
- Canggu, with Canggu, Bloran, Botoputih, Dempok, Pandan, Pandan Kidul (also called Surowono) and Sidodadi.
- Krecek, with Krecek, Balongmanyar, Balongsari, Bumirejo, Karangnongko, Mulyorejo, Nepen, Pulorejo and Sumberagung.
- Lamong, with Lamong and Mangiran — the smallest village on the list, with a spring called Sumber Urung-Urung.
- Sekoto, with Sekoto, Genukwatu, Gondang, Kemendung, Puhrejo and Sukosari; the district’s landfill sits here, a plain fact of a rural district that has to handle waste for the surrounding area.
- Tunglur, with Tunglur, Banaran, Paldaplang, Pogar, Sambiresik, Sembung, Sumberjo (known locally as Jengglong) and Sumbersuko — eight hamlets.
Several of these names repeat the same root words. Balong appears in Balongrejo, Balongcino, Balongjambe, Balongmanyar and Balongsari, and in Javanese it points to ponds, which suits a district threaded with water. Sumber, meaning a spring or source, turns up in Sumberjo, Sumbersari, Sumberagung and Sumbersuko. The names read like a description of the landscape, and the spring at Lamong belongs to the same water-rich picture.
Candi Surowono at Canggu
The temple that most visitors come to Badas for is Candi Surowono, also spelled Surawana, in Canggu village. It is a Hindu temple of the Majapahit period, generally dated to about 1390, and it was built as a memorial to Wijayarajasa, the Prince of Wengker, an uncle by marriage of the Majapahit king Rajasanagara, who is better known by his personal name, Hayam Wuruk. The building was not formally finished until about 1400, when a funeral rite for the prince was held, which explains why two dates are quoted for it. The wider story of the realm behind it is told in the guide to the Kediri Kingdom, and the temple has its own guide as Candi Surawana near Pare.
What survives is the base, roughly 7.8 metres square and 4.6 metres high, and it is the base that carries the reliefs. The temple faces west, as most East Javanese temples do, and a projection on the base holds the steps to the inner chamber. The Arjunawiwaha story wraps around the building in a long band. Scenes on the east-facing sides lean toward religious subjects, while the west-facing panels show demons, monsters, battles and death. Between them are small, individually framed panels of animal fables drawn from the Tantri Kamandaka collection, among them the tale of the heron, the fish and the crab. The Sri Tanjung story, a tale of a wronged wife and a river, is also carved on the temple, and so is the story of the ascetic Bubuksah and his companion Gagangaking.
The upper body of the temple is missing; only the base has been restored to its original form, and a number of loose bricks lie near the site waiting to be fitted back in. Dutch-era surveyors, Verbeek and Knebel, first recorded the ruin in the early twentieth century, and a restoration of the base was carried out in the years before the First World War. This is part of why the carvings reward slow looking: you stand at eye level with panels that on other temples are metres above you.
The site is kept clean of moss and is lit at night. Visitors are asked to keep the area clean, not to scratch the stone and not to move or take stones. Visitors from Bali and from Kediri come here to see the carvings, so the temple is treated with the same care as any protected heritage site, not only as a ruin. Street vendors set up outside the fence when the temple is busy.
Other Places in Canggu: The Cave, the Dam and the Spring Pool
Canggu has more than the temple, even if the detail on these is thinner than on the temple itself. Local accounts point to a cave in the Surowono hamlet, Gua Surowono; a dam on the village’s edge, Bendungan Canggu; and a spring-fed pool, Sendang Drajat. What can be said with confidence is that they exist, they are in Canggu, and they are smaller draws than the temple. Dams in a rice plain like this are about water holding and release, so they matter first to farmers and only second to visitors.
Another hamlet of Canggu, Sidodadi, has a market known locally as Pasar Kencong, also called Pasar Pabrik. The second name recalls a Dutch-era sugar company that once stood nearby. Kediri’s lowland was sugar country in the colonial period, and the market’s alternative name keeps that memory on a farm road. The district around Kras, a few districts south, still has a sugar mill, and the write-up of Kras District describes that railway and mill landscape.
Bringin and Its Beekeepers
Bringin village, in the hamlet of Purworejo, is known locally as a beekeeping centre, sometimes called Kampung Madu, “Honey Village”. Local beekeepers there keep Apis mellifera, the domesticated honey bee that can be housed in hives — a practical point, since the other honey-producing bees found in Indonesia, the wild Apis dorsata and Apis cerana, are far harder to keep in managed colonies. That is what makes a hive-based honey village possible on flat farmland rather than only in forest. Honey is the main product sold, and the village’s tourism-awareness group promotes it as a local specialty, with visits built around watching how a hive is managed.
Bringin also appears in the regency’s own tourism listings as a developed tourism village, grouped with cultural, natural and artificial attractions, and a course in growing orchids has reportedly been run there for local residents.
Other Village Details Worth Knowing
Lamong, the smallest of the eight villages, has its spring named Sumber Urung-Urung. Krecek and Blaru each hold nine hamlets and Tunglur holds eight, so these three are the most finely divided villages on the map. Local accounts also mention a small centre of craftsmen reported to make air rifles somewhere in the district, and a former railway station that survives mainly in old photographs.
The central market, Pasar Badas, is the district’s everyday shopping point, and a state junior high school in Badas village is locally known as the district’s main secondary school. These are the ordinary landmarks of a rural district: a market, a school, a former station and a market with a sugar-company name.
Getting to Badas and Reading the District on the Ground
Badas is reached from Pare, which sits immediately south, and from the Kediri road network that fans out across the regency. Air travellers use Dhoho Airport near Kediri, and the city side of the regency is described under Kediri City. A simple way to read the district is to use Canggu as the anchor: the temple is the fixed point, the dam and cave are within the same village, and the neighbouring villages of Bringin and Lamong are short journeys across the same fields.
Because the terrain is flat, distances are easier than they look on a hill route. Roads run straight between rice blocks, and hamlet names tell you which bend you are at. The best time to see the plain at its most striking is when the paddies are freshly flooded or green, which in Java follows the planting calendar, not a fixed month, so it is better to treat the rice stage as a thing to look at when you arrive than a date to plan around.
Pairing Badas With the Rest of the Regency
A day in Badas combines naturally with its neighbours. Ngasem holds the large Simpang Lima Gumul monument, explained in the guide to Simpang Lima Gumul. Kayen Kidul, the other district created in the same split, has fruit farms and a market, and is described on the page for Kayen Kidul District. Both are within the same lowland and can be reached without crossing the Brantas. The wider East Java context, from Bromo to Ijen, is on the page for East Java from Bali.
For a quiet visit the combination is simple: start with the temple at Canggu, look at the dam and the spring pool nearby, stop at the Sidodadi market and its sugar-company name, and finish with the beekeepers of Bringin. That is a route made of real places in a small district, and each stop reflects what the district actually is: farmland, water, a past kingdom and a local rural craft.