Pattaya Thailand Guide

Naklua and Wongamat: Pattaya's Old Fishing Town and Its Quietest Beach Every city has a direction it grew from, and for Pattaya that direction is north. Before there was a Beach Road, a Walking Street or a skyline, there was Naklua — spelled Na Kluea on the official signs, which means salt fields, after the salt pans that once glittered behind its shore. Naklua was a fishing village and a salt town when Pattaya was still a quiet bay the boats passed on their way there, and the remarkable thing, seventy years into the resort era, is how much of that older town is still standing in plain sight: the morning fish market, the wooden shophouses, the Chinese temples, the small piers, and families who have sold seafood on the same streets for three generations. Attached to its western edge, curving away from the fishing quarter, is Wongamat Beach — also written Wong Amat — a kilometre and a bit of sand with no beach road behind it, no jet-ski roar in front of it, and a line of resorts an...

Sanctuary of Truth: Pattaya's Wooden Temple by the Sea From the beach in Naklua, it looks like something out of a myth: a vast wooden palace of towers, gables, and carved figures rising 105 metres above the shoreline, with not a single metal nail in its structure. The Sanctuary of Truth is Pattaya's most extraordinary building — part temple, part museum, part ongoing work of art — and it has been under construction since 1981, and deliberately may never be called finished. If you only visit one cultural sight in Pattaya, make it this one. What It Is — and What It Is Not The Sanctuary was commissioned by Thai businessman Lek Viriyaphant, who also created the Ancient City and the Erawan Museum near Bangkok. It is not an ancient temple and not a functioning monastery. It is a philosophical building: its carvings tell stories from Hindu and Buddhist traditions, exploring themes of creation, knowledge, morality, and humanity's place in the universe. Every surface is covered —...