Pattaya Thailand Guide

Between Pattaya Beach and Jomtien, on the wooded ridge of Pratumnak Hill, sits the image most Pattaya postcards forget: an 18-metre golden Buddha looking out over the bay. Wat Phra Yai — Big Buddha Hill — is an active temple, not a ticketed attraction, and together with the Pattaya City viewpoint five minutes away on the same hill it makes the best free half-morning in the city. The Temple and the Big Buddha The temple dates to the 1940s, when Pattaya was still a fishing town. The Big Buddha, built in 1977 and officially named Phra Buddha Sukhothai Walai Chonlathan (locals call him Luang Pho Yai), is the largest Buddha image in Chonburi province, about 18 metres tall and seated in the Mara-subduing posture roughly 100 metres above sea level. You reach the terrace up a broad staircase flanked by two long golden naga serpents — seven-headed snakes that run the full length of the handrails. At the top, a terrace rings the main image with smaller Buddha statues in different postures, on...

Pratumnak Hill: Big Buddha, the Pattaya Viewpoint and Pattaya's Green Headland There is one place in Pattaya where you can stand in the shade of a temple tree, look north over the whole curve of Pattaya Bay, turn around and look south over Jomtien, and have an eighteen-metre golden Buddha at your back while you do it. That place is Pratumnak Hill — spelled Phra Tamnak and Pratamnak on some signs, and called Khao Phra Tamnak in Thai, which means Palace Hill. It is not high, at about 98 metres it is simply the highest natural point in the city, and it is not far, sitting on the green headland between Pattaya Beach and Jomtien Beach, about two kilometres south of central Pattaya. But in a flat, fast, vertical city, this one wooded hill changes everything. It is Pattaya's viewpoint, its most important temple, its fitness park, its quietest residential streets and some of its prettiest small beaches, all stacked onto a single headland. Almost every visitor photographs the hill wit...