Ayodhya sits on the Sarayu River in Uttar Pradesh and is revered in Hindu tradition as the birthplace of Rama and the setting for much of the Ramayana, ranking among the Sapta Puri, the seven cities Hindu tradition holds to grant liberation. Pilgrims have visited its temples for centuries, and the city carries an accumulated layer of shrines, monasteries and bathing ghats along the river comparable to other major Hindu pilgrimage cities such as Varanasi and Mathura, Krishna's traditional birthplace.
This religious standing is separate from, and uncontested by, the modern legal dispute over one specific plot inside the city, covered in the companion article. Ayodhya's wider sanctity to Hindus was never itself in question in that litigation; what was disputed was title to a single site, and this atlas records the two facts, citywide sanctity and site specific dispute, as distinct rather than treating either as settling the other.
Ayodhya today functions as both a functioning pilgrimage city, with ongoing worship, festivals and temple construction, and as the subject of the most closely watched religious property case in modern Indian legal history, and visitors and scholars alike generally distinguish the devotional city from the litigated plot even where both occupy the same few acres of ground.