Tarik district is the westernmost district of Sidoarjo Regency, a flat farming landscape where the Brantas river divides and the regency ends at the border with Mojokerto. It is a place most travellers cross without noticing, yet it holds a Dutch-era river control system that still decides where floodwater goes, a brick site found in a rice field in 2018, and a string of twenty villages strung between canals and fields. Getting around Tarik is simple once its landmarks and main roads are clear.
Where Tarik District Sits
Tarik lies on the western side of Sidoarjo. To its north is Balongbendo district and to its east is Prambon district, both in Sidoarjo. To the south and west the boundary is not with another Sidoarjo district at all: it is the line with Mojokerto Regency, where the neighbouring districts are Mojoanyar and Mojosari to the south and Jetis to the west. That makes Tarik a gateway. The road from Mojokerto and the ancient Majapahit heartland at Trowulan comes in through the district, and the railway does the same.
The land is low and almost entirely alluvial. Farmland takes up a large share of the total area, and the typical view is paddy fields interrupted by irrigation canals, small roadside markets and village clusters. Compared with the busy industrial districts nearer Surabaya, the pace is rural. For the bigger picture, see the East Java overview, and for the old capital region just across the border, the guide to Trowulan.
The Twenty Villages of Tarik
The district has twenty villages: Banjarwungu, Balongmacekan, Gampingrowo, Gempolklutuk, Janti, Kalimati, Kedungbocok, Kedinding, Kemuning, Kendalsewu, Klantingsari, Kramattemenggung, Mergobener, Mergosari, Mindugading, Mliriprowo, Sebani, Segodobancang, Singogalih and Tarik. Kramattemenggung and Singogalih are also spelled in other ways, so a name on a road sign may not match the one on a map.
The village of Tarik, where the railway station stands, sits at the heart of the district, and the station, the main road and the market stops a traveller needs are all in the Tarik area.
| Village | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Tarik | Railway station and the road toward Mojokerto |
| Kedinding | A second railway station |
| Kedungbocok | Site of the 2018 brick find |
| Mliriprowo | Where the Brantas divides, at the western edge |
| Singogalih | On the Tarik to Mliriprowo road |
| Kemuning | Home of the district health centre |
Where the Brantas Splits: Mliriprowo and the Weirs
The most important landscape feature in Tarik district is hydraulic. The Brantas is the largest river in East Java, and just upstream of the Sidoarjo border, near Mliriprowo, its flow is shared between two channels. One is the Kali Mas, which runs north toward Surabaya, and the other is the Kali Porong, which runs east and south through Sidoarjo to the Madura Strait. The weirs and gates that control this split decide how much water goes toward Surabaya and how much toward Sidoarjo.
The key structure is the Rolak Songo weir, whose name means nine gates in Javanese. The story starts in the Dutch era, when a weir at Lengkong was completed in 1857 to control floods and supply water to the sugar estates, and the structure was renewed as Rolak Songo in the 1970s. The weir stands on the Mojokerto side of the border, but its effects are felt in Tarik, and the Mliriprowo bridge over it is an important link between the two regencies. A neighbouring weir named Mlirip, with the nearby Kepajaran dam, sends water into the canals that feed farmland on both sides of the river.
One small oddity of the border is that the old village of Mlirip was split when the works were built. Part of it became a Mojokerto village; the Sidoarjo portion is today’s Mliriprowo. When the river rises, the road in Mliriprowo can be undercut by the current, as happened in January 2025 when a stretch of road collapsed after heavy rain.
The Kali Mas ends up in the heart of Surabaya, and you can follow the story downstream in the guide to the Kalimas River.
The Landscape From West to East
Tarik is the best place in Sidoarjo to see the regency’s western zone. Across the regency the land falls in three bands: a coastal strip below three metres given over to shrimp and fish ponds, a middle band between three and ten metres with towns, shops and government offices, and a western band between ten and twenty-five metres where agriculture dominates. Tarik belongs to that last band, which is the reason it feels so different from Waru or Sidoarjo town a little further east. Rainfall in the regency runs between roughly 1,300 and 1,700 millimetres a year and temperatures stay between about 21 and 34 degrees through the year.
The same slope explains the canals. Water enters at the Brantas split in the west and runs downhill across Tarik and the districts beyond it. The Mangetan canal carries water north, while the Porong canal carries it south, both fed from the Kepajaran dam. Because everything depends on the same few gates and dams, a failure upstream is felt in villages far downstream.
Floods in Tarik
Because the district lies close to the dams and canals, floods are a recurring fact of life. In early December 2024, heavy rain on two consecutive days put five villages in Tarik under water: Banjarwungu, Gempolklutuk, Kemuning, Mergosari and Kalimati, with water as high as half a metre. The same event inundated parts of neighbouring Prambon and Balongbendo, and a failure at the Tarik dam let water reach a village in Prambon. Anyone planning a visit during the peak of the rainy season should be prepared for road closures and detours.
The Brick Find at Kedungbocok
In early 2018 residents of Kedungbocok noticed a brick structure in a field close to a cemetery. When it was uncovered it proved to be a long wall built of stacked brick courses, and attention quickly turned to Majapahit, because the bricks resemble those at Trowulan. The site is known as Alas Trik, a name linked in local lore to an old forest and to the early settlement of Raden Wijaya, the founder of Majapahit. The local story and the excavation sit side by side at the site, so check locally before you go for the latest on the digging.
For a reader who wants to compare, the brick monuments of Trowulan are the obvious next step. The overview of the Majapahit empire sets out the kingdom’s history, and the Trowulan museum page describes the finds held just across the regency border. The Kedungbocok site itself is a working field and an excavation, not a formal visitor attraction.
Roads, Rail and Getting There
Tarik is one of the few places in Sidoarjo where road and rail enter from the west. The station at Tarik is the westernmost in the regency, and a second station stands at Kedinding. The commuter service that links Sidoarjo and Mojokerto calls here, and the double-track works between Sepanjang and Mojokerto pass through the district. The guide to trains in East Java is the place to read on how that line connects with the main network.
By road, the bus corridor that runs from Mojokerto into Sidoarjo and Surabaya enters Sidoarjo through Tarik. A local road about five and a half kilometres long, concreted in 2023, links the villages of Tarik, Singogalih, Kedungbocok and Mliriprowo and acts as an alternative for cars travelling between Mojokerto and Sidoarjo. During its construction, traffic from the Mliriprowo bridge toward Kedungbocok was diverted through a hamlet of Mliriprowo, which gives you an idea of how narrow the choices are. A rest area stands at Mliriprowo for travellers on the river road.
Farming and Daily Life
Farmland covers more than half of the district, and the standard crops are rice, secondary food crops, sugarcane, coconut and fruit. This is a legacy of the Dutch sugar era, when the weirs and canals were built to serve cane estates as well as flood control. The canal system still distributes water to fields on both sides, which is why the Kepajaran dam and the Mangetan and Porong canals feature so prominently in local conversation. A large paper factory is the district’s main industrial presence, and most households combine farming, wage work and trade.
Health care is handled by two health centres, one in Kemuning and one in Tarik village, and larger hospitals are in Sidoarjo and Mojokerto. Markets are small and local. The visitor who stops in Tarik will mainly find ordinary rural life: motorbikes on narrow roads, farmers working canals, and low houses that sit just above field level.
Is Tarik Worth a Stop?
Tarik district rewards people who are interested in water, history or rural Java, rather than in monuments or beaches. It suits a short detour for anyone travelling by train or road between Mojokerto and Sidoarjo, or a longer afternoon for those who want to look at the weirs and canals, ask about Alas Trik, and see how the Brantas is divided. Before you go, check the weather, as river levels and road conditions can change quickly in the wet months.