English: The Dodda Basappa temple is located to the north of the village Dambal in Gadag district between Hampi and Goa. It is about 15 kilometers south-southeast of Lakkundi group of Jain and Hindu temples, and 105 kilometers west of UNESCO world heritage site of Hampi. It can be reached by State Highway 129, and is close to the National Highway 67.

• Dambal was an important ancient town, one with its own fort, that is also referred to as Dharmapura and Dharmavolal in historic Hindu and Jain texts. A prosperous town, it was a center of education and monasteries. A number of stone inscriptions and texts state it to be the site of schools and monasteries of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism by mid 1st millennium. All three major religious traditions were thriving in Dambal till about the 13th-century.
• Dambal was destroyed in raids, looting and Muslim-Hindu wars that swept this region in and after the 13th-century as Sultanates attempt to establish themselves. By the 19th-century, Dambal was a forgotten village. Colonial era British officials and archaeologists visited Dambal in the second half of the 19th-century, finding the site to be full of mounds, ruined temples with forest growing over them. The Dambal area has many ruins, predominantly of Hindu and Jain traditions, as well as historic stepwells (Japada Bavi) and remnants of a fort. Two temples amongst these are significant to the history of Hindu architecture: the Dodda Basappa temple and the Somesvara temple.
• The Dodda Basappa gudi (lit. "Great Nandi temple") is a temple dedicated to Svayambhu Shiva. An inscription here helps confirm that the temple was already operating in 1184 CE. The architectural features here, in context of other major temples in Lakkundi region, suggest that this temple is likely from 1100 CE to 1125 CE.
• The Doddabasappa gudi is one of the best illustrations of a large stellate-style Hindu temple (i.e. star-shaped), one formed by precisely rotating a square. This temple sanctum and vimana (spire) is about 35 feet in diameter and forms a 24-pointed star. The circular rotation of a square principle was also deployed by the architects of this temple to form its gudhamandapa, giving the wall and space an aesthetic feel of radially swirling an unfurled symmetry. The artisans then harmonically repeated this principle at different scales in the decorative scheme in the artwork on the outer wall, inside the mandapa and on the pillars.
• The Doddabasappa temple is notable for incorporating a torana inside the temple, as well as konikas that harmonically repeat the torana as artwork, a feature that is a "special distinction of this temple's subtly delicate and fanning wall divisions", according to Meister and Dhaky. The torana once had Brahma-Shiva-Vishnu in the framed space, but this has been lost. Inside the mandapa are many small mutilated remnants of temple artwork that once was a part of this temple.
• The artwork spans the typical Hindu universe, including gandharvas, prakrit (nature), dancers, musicians, scenes of mithuna kama, dharma and artha. While a Shaiva temple, this is another temple of the Lakkundi region that depicts and reverentially integrates Vaishnava and Shakti legends inside the main closed mandapa, on its pillars and the torana.
• The pillars are polished, finely stenciled in upper parts, and intricately carved on all four vertical faces of a cube at the bottom. These carvings depict legends from the Hindu Vedas, Puranas and the Epics.
• The doors into the mandapa and the sanctum are carved with miniature motifs in seven sakhas (parallel layers).
• The temple is locally named after the big Nandi that sits in an open mandapa in front of the temple. There are many more Nandi in the temple of different sizes.

The temple is one of India's national monuments, protected and managed by ASI (N-KA-D231).