Shatrunjaya carries close to nine hundred temples and no residents, and the second fact is the more revealing one.
The rule
Every pilgrim, every priest and every attendant descends before nightfall. The temples are locked and the hill is left to itself.
The reason given is not practical. The summit is understood as a dwelling of the divine, and human residence there would be a presumption, so the hill is used by day and vacated at dusk, every day, without exception.
The rule belongs to the trust and the tradition rather than to any law, and it has held for centuries.
The climb
More than three thousand five hundred steps. Pilgrims customarily make the ascent without eating, and many without drinking, and are expected to come down the same day.
Devout Jains aim to make the climb ninety-nine times in a lifetime, a practice called the navvanu jatra, undertaken over successive seasons.
Over four hundred thousand made the ascent in 2010.
Whose hill it is
Shatrunjaya is a Svetambara site. The Anandji Kalyanji Trust, a lay body founded in the seventeenth century by the Ahmedabad merchant Shantidas Zaveri, has administered it since about 1730.
That is characteristic of Jain institutional life and worth noticing: the great Jain sites are run by merchant trusts, not by monastic orders. Jain ascetics own nothing and cannot administer property, so the laity does it, and the laity in question has historically been mercantile and wealthy.
Digambaras maintain a single temple on the hill and assert no claim on the rest. Unlike Girnar or Sammed Shikharji, Shatrunjaya is not a site of inter-order dispute.
What is actually old
Tradition claims eleventh-century foundations and two images of that date survive. But very little of the standing fabric predates the twelfth century, and most is considerably later.
The hill was sacked and rebuilt repeatedly, by Delhi Sultanate forces in the fourteenth century among others, and what stands is the product of a community that kept rebuilding on the same ground.
The vegetarian town
In 2014 the town of Palitana below the hill prohibited the sale of meat, fish and eggs, following a hunger strike by Jain monks. It is described as the first legally vegetarian town in the world.
It is also a fair indication that this is a community which polices the conduct of the area around its sacred site, and does so successfully.