Jaipur

Top things to do in Jaipur

1. 01

   Amber Fort - the hillside palace above Maota Lake

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   The Kachhwaha capital before Jaipur existed, begun in 1592 by a Rajput general who served Akbar, and it shows in the building: a sandstone and marble palace stacked up a ridge, Mughal in its symmetry and Rajput in its screened balconies and painted ceilings. You come up through the great courtyard where the armies mustered, then through a gate covered in fresco to the mirrored hall, where thousands of pieces of convex glass were set into the ceiling so that a few candles read as a night sky. Behind it are the twelve identical apartments of the queens, arranged around a courtyard so that the maharaja could visit one without the others knowing, and a garden laid out on a terrace in the lake below. Go at opening, before the coaches and the heat, and allow a couple of hours.

2. 02

   City Palace - the working royal residence in the middle of the grid

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   A palace complex occupying a seventh of the walled city, and unusual in that the family still lives in part of it, so the tall block at the centre is a private home rather than a museum. What you walk is the outer sequence of courtyards: a reception hall of scalloped arches, an armoury of Rajput daggers and matchlocks, a textile gallery of court dress and Pashmina, and a hall holding two enormous silver urns made to carry the Ganges water a maharaja drank on his voyage to England. The set piece is a small inner courtyard with four painted doorways, one for each season, worked in peacock, lotus, rose and green leaf, and it is where every queue in the palace forms.

3. 03

   Hawa Mahal - the honeycomb screen above the bazaar

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   Built in 1799 as a five-storey facade and almost nothing else, a curtain of pink sandstone pierced by more than nine hundred small windows so that the women of the palace could watch the processions and the market street below without being seen. It is barely a room deep in places, the upper floors are reached by ramps rather than stairs, and the breeze through all those screens is the point of the name. The famous view of it is from the street outside, facing east, which means early morning light and the least traffic; the inside gives you the rooftop view back down the bazaar and a much quieter half hour than the pavement.

4. 04

   Nahargarh Fort - the ridge road and the sunset over the city

   history scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   The fort on the ridge directly above the old city, built in 1734 as part of the defensive line and turned much later into a hilltop retreat. The building people actually come for is the nineteenth-century block of nine near-identical suites arranged around a courtyard, one for each of a maharaja's queens, connected by corridors and painted in faded floral patterns. What makes it worth the trip is the wall on the city side, where the whole grid lies out below and the lights come on across it at dusk, and the road up along the ridge, which is one of the best drives in Jaipur. There is a sculpture park in the grounds and a stepwell just outside.

5. 05

   The old city bazaars - Johari, Tripolia, Bapu and Kishanpole

   shopping culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   The reason the grid was drawn in the first place, and still organised by trade rather than by brand: gemstones and enamelled gold along one street, lac bangles being shaped over a flame in a lane off another, textiles and printed cloth on a third, and slippers, brassware, quilts and marble carving in between. Bargaining is expected everywhere except the fixed-price government emporium and the handful of established stores, and the further you get from the tourist corner the better the prices get. Doing it properly means walking one street end to end rather than dipping into six, and stopping at one of the old sweet houses in the jewellery bazaar, which are institutions in their own right.

6. 06

   Jantar Mantar - Jai Singh's stone astronomical instruments

   history culture arts

   The founder of the city built five observatories across northern India and this is the largest and best preserved, a walled compound of nineteen masonry instruments that look like abstract sculpture and are in fact working machines. The giant sundial stands about the height of a nine-storey building and tells local time to within a couple of seconds; other instruments read declination, altitude and the position of the sun in each sign of the zodiac, and there is a bowl set into the ground you walk inside to take a reading. Almost none of it is self-explanatory, so this is the one place in Jaipur where a guide or the audio tour genuinely changes the visit.

7. 07

   Jaigarh Fort - the armoury above Amber and the great cannon

   history scenic

   The military half of the pair on the hill, joined to the palace below by a fortified passage, and the one the crowds skip. It holds Jaivana, a wheeled cannon cast in the fort's own foundry in the eighteenth century and among the largest ever made, fired once and never used in anger. The rest is a working fortress: an armoury, granaries, an enormous water-harvesting system of channels and underground tanks that supplied the whole garrison, and long stretches of rampart with a view straight down onto the Amber courtyards. Getting between the two on foot is a stiff climb, and most people take the road.

8. 08

   Panna Meena ka Kund - the criss-cross stepwell below Amer

   history scenic

   A square sixteenth-century stepwell a short walk from the Amber palace, with symmetrical flights of steps zigzagging down all four sides in a pattern that photographs better than almost anything else in Rajasthan. It was a working water source and a place to sit out the heat, and the small rooms around the top edge were for exactly that. Descending the steps is no longer allowed, which does not much matter, since the point is the geometry seen from the rim. Combine it with the hand-block-printing museum in a restored haveli a few minutes away.

9. 09

   Jal Mahal - the water palace on Man Sagar

   scenic history

   A five-storey palace sitting in the middle of a lake on the Amber road, with four of its floors under water whenever the lake is full, built as a hunting lodge and pleasure pavilion. You cannot go in, and that is fine: the whole experience is the embankment on the near shore, best at first light or as the sun goes behind the hills, when the building reflects and the migratory birds are working the shallows. The promenade is a genuine local evening scene of snack carts, families and camel photographers, and it is on the way to and from the forts anyway.

10. 10

    Albert Hall Museum - the Indo-Saracenic pile in Ram Niwas Garden

    culture arts history

    The state museum, opened in 1887 in a public garden south of the walled city, and one of the best examples anywhere of the hybrid style the British architects of the period invented by grafting Mughal domes and chhatris onto a European plan. The collection is an old-fashioned cabinet of a place: Rajasthani miniatures, arms, carpets, a famous Persian garden carpet, brass, ivory, folk instruments and an Egyptian mummy that generations of Jaipur schoolchildren have queued for. It is floodlit after dark, which is when most locals photograph it, and the lawns outside fill with pigeons and families every evening.

11. 11

    Galta Ji - the temple tanks in the gorge east of the city

    history scenic

    A complex of pink temples, pavilions and bathing tanks wedged into a narrow gap in the Aravallis a short drive east, fed by a natural spring that runs out of a carved cow's head into the main tank. Pilgrims bathe here, the painted pavilions above are eighteenth century and mostly empty, and a large troop of macaques has the run of the site, which is where the tourist nickname comes from and which is also the reason not to carry food or loose sunglasses. Walk up the ridge behind it to the small sun temple for a view back over the whole city at the end of the day.

12. 12

    Block printing, blue pottery and the gem trade - Jaipur's crafts

    culture arts shopping

    Three of them define the city. Hand block printing puts carved teak blocks onto cotton in repeat by eye, in the fine floral Sanganeri style on white and the mud-resist indigo of Bagru. Blue pottery is a Persian technique that arrived through the court and uses ground quartz rather than clay, so it is fired low and comes out translucent blue and white. And Jaipur cuts and sets a large share of the world's coloured stones, mostly out of small workshops around the jewellery bazaar. Several workshops and museums in and around the city let you watch the work and try the printing yourself, which is a better souvenir than the finished cloth.

13. 13

    Dal baati churma, laal maas and the kachori counters - eating in Jaipur

    food culture arts

    The regional cooking is desert food: hard wheat balls baked in embers, split and drowned in ghee, served with lentils and a sweet crumble of the same dough; dumplings of gram flour in a yoghurt curry; dried beans and caper berries cooked because nothing fresh grew; and a fiery red mutton curry built on whole Mathania chillies that is the one dish to order if you eat meat. The other half of the city's food life is snacks and sweets, above all the onion-stuffed kachori eaten at a counter for breakfast and its sweet cousin filled with reduced milk, and a monsoon-only disc of syrup-soaked batter that appears in every sweet-shop window once the rains start. There is also a purpose-built open-air food court in the garden by the museum that gathers a lot of it in one place.

14. 14

    Birla Mandir and Moti Dungri - white marble under a private fort

    culture arts history

    A modern temple of white Makrana marble at the foot of a small hill in the south of the city, built by an industrialist family and finished in the 1980s, with carved panels that mix Hindu deities with figures from other traditions and stained glass telling scenes from the epics. It is lit up after dark and is at its best then. On the hill directly above it sits a small palace-fort in a Scottish-castle silhouette that belongs to the royal family and is closed to the public, so the temple terrace is as close as you get, and the two together are the standard evening stop for Jaipur families.

15. 15

    Jhalana Leopard Reserve - a safari inside the city limits

    nature wildlife adventure

    A patch of dry deciduous forest on a ridge on the eastern edge of Jaipur, hemmed in by suburbs, holding a resident population of leopards that has become genuinely reliable to see on a morning or evening drive. Trips run in open vehicles on fixed slots, permits are limited and go early in the cool months, and the same forest carries striped hyena, jackal, desert fox, nilgai and a lot of birds. It is not a wilderness experience and does not pretend to be; the appeal is that you can be back in the old city for lunch, and it makes a good substitute if you cannot spare the days for a full tiger park.

16. 16

    Patrika Gate and the Mughal-style gardens on the Agra road

    culture arts scenic

    The city keeps building in its own idiom, and the clearest demonstration is a gateway on a roundabout in the southern suburbs whose eight painted arches carry motifs from each region of Rajasthan, floor to ceiling, in colours that most historic buildings have long since lost. It sits on a circular garden that is a genuine local park rather than a sight. Older and quieter are the two terraced pleasure gardens on the road east towards Agra, laid out for a queen and for the city's planner, with fountains, murals of Krishna and painted pavilions stepping up a hillside.

Getting to & around Jaipur

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