Dwarka occupies an odd position among the Char Dham: the tradition itself holds that the place being commemorated no longer exists.
The account
Krishna leaves Mathura and founds Dwarka on the Gujarat coast, ruling there for the rest of his life. After his death the sea takes the city. That is not a later embellishment or a rationalisation of ruins, the submergence is part of the story as the tradition tells it.
So pilgrims come to the site of a capital that the account says was lost, and the temple stands for a city rather than continuing one.
The temple
The building as it stands is largely sixteenth-century work on older foundations; tradition attributes the original to Krishna's great-grandson Vajranabha.
Its flag is the thing people come to watch. The spire carries a large flag that is changed several times a day, each change sponsored by a family, and the waiting list runs to years.
What marine archaeology actually found
Underwater investigation off the coast has recovered stone structures, anchorages and pottery in the shallows. This establishes early harbour settlement in the area, which is a real and interesting finding.
It does not establish the city of the epic. Claims that the submerged remains are demonstrably Krishna's Dwarka, or that they can be dated to the third millennium BCE, go well beyond what the excavations support, and they circulate widely.
The distinction matters and is easy to state: there was an old port here, and that is not the same proposition as the Mahabharata being a municipal record.
The four corners
Dwarka stands with Puri, Rameswaram and Badrinath as the western point of the all-India Char Dham, a scheme attributed to Adi Shankara, and, like the rest of that attribution, the tradition's account of its own organisation rather than a documented project.