Long before Ramanuja ever taught there, Srirangam was already sacred ground: the Tamil Alvar poet-saints, whose devotional hymns to Vishnu date from the early centuries of the Tamil devotional tradition, named it first among the 108 divyadesas, the sacred sites their poetry singles out as places where the divine is understood to be especially present and accessible. That literary primacy gave the site a theological importance well before its architecture matched it, and centuries of subsequent royal patronage, particularly under the Chola, Pandya and Vijayanagara dynasties, expanded the temple into the vast walled complex of concentric enclosures that visitors encounter today, an accretion of building campaigns spanning roughly a millennium rather than the work of any single era.
The scale that resulted is not a matter of local pride alone: Srirangam is measured as the largest Hindu temple complex still in continuous active worship anywhere in the world, distinguishing it from larger religious complexes elsewhere that function primarily as archaeological sites or museums rather than living places of worship. Its annual Margazhi festival, held over twenty-one days in December and January, draws roughly a million visitors to a single temple in a single season, a scale of ongoing pilgrimage that few sites anywhere, Hindu or otherwise, can match.